tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267Wed, 03 Dec 2014 00:28:26 +0000Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwaldhttp://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)Blogger809125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117131300396750020Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:36:00 +00002007-02-24T13:10:56.260-02:00Moved to SalonThis blog has moved to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon. </span>It is now located <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald">here</a> (non-subscribers can view the blog for free by clicking through the ad for a Day Pass). The blog can also always be accessed through <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>'s <a href="http://www.salon.com">front page</a>. I will also be a Contributing Writer there and will write at least one feature article per month.<br /><br />The blog's archives will remain here at least for the time being (and we will ensure that all previously used links continue to function). Some features at the new blog are still a work in progress, and some features will be modified based on reader feedback. My explanation about the move to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>is <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news.html">here</a> and <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blogs-alternative-political-systems.html">here</a>.<br /><br />Any notations about the move and blogroll adjustments would be appreciated.<br /><br />The RSS feed for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> blog is <a href="http://feeds.salon.com/salon/greenwald">here</a>.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/moved-to-salon.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117128072182154279Mon, 12 Feb 2007 11:37:00 +00002007-02-12T12:06:52.826-02:00Giving Democrats a pass on ending the war?<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br /><a href="http://www.acepilots.com/mt/">Commissar</a> is a right-wing blogger and long-time Bush supporter. He originally supported the Iraq war but some time last year finally came to the conclusion that the war has been a failure and was a mistake from the start. He acknowledged his own errors in judgment in supporting the war and, in the midterm elections, he supported and <a href="http://acepilots.com/mt/2006/10/02/why-i-am-voting-democratic-in-2006/">voted for Democrats</a> because (like many voters) he wanted them to take over Congress and put a stop to the war. This weekend, he wrote <a href="http://acepilots.com/mt/2007/02/10/on-defunding-the-war/">a post</a> in which he asks:<br /><blockquote><br />Why are the Netroots NOT constantly hammering the Dem majorities in Congress to de-fund the war? . . . Obviously defunding the war (or at least the surge) could be politically costly. But what is more important? Stopping the war or holding onto political power?<br /><br />That is a question which is a tough one for the Dem politicians. To some extent, I understand their reluctance to take such a move, which might have political consequences. . . .<br /><br />Those who disagree with the war in Iraq should be opposing it every day, almost to the exclusion of other topics. . . . Why not <a href="http://www.mydd.com/story/2007/2/8/17574/09512">pile on the pressure</a> on Congressional leaders to stop funding the war? What would a patriot do? Why did I vote Dem in 2006? Your side has the power, guys.</blockquote><br />In this morning's <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times</span>, John Yoo has an <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/12/opinion/12yoochu.html">Op-Ed</a>, co-written with attorney Lynn Chu, which makes a similar point:<br /><blockquote><br />[B]ehind all the bluster, the one thing all the major Democratic proposals have in common is that they are purely symbolic resolutions, with all the force of a postcard. . . .The fact is, Congress has every power to end the war — if it really wanted to. It has the power of the purse. . . . Not only could Congress cut off money, it could require scheduled troop withdrawals, shrink or eliminate units, or freeze weapons supplies. It could even repeal or amend the authorization to use force it passed in 2002. . . .<br /><br />The truth is that the Democrats in Congress would rather sit back and let the president take the heat in war than do anything risky. That way they get to prepare for the next election while pointing fingers of blame and spinning conspiracy theories.</blockquote><br />It is, I think, very hard to deny that there are some valid points lurking here. Most Bush critics accept these two premises: (1) Congress has the power to compel a withdrawal of troops from Iraq and (2) a withdrawal -- whether immediate or one that is completed within, say, six to nine months -- is vitally important. It is important in its own right and, perhaps even more so, because it is our presence in Iraq which enables all sorts of future disasters, including a looming confrontation with Iran.<br /><br />Yet the Democratic-controlled Congress is clearly <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> going to attempt to exercise its power to compel the end of this war -- at least not any time soon. And, with <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/5/155255/9610">some</a> <a href="http://www.talkleft.com/story/2007/2/3/135858/2212">exceptions</a>, there seems to be very few objections over that failure, very little clamoring that they do more. Why is that? What accounts for the seeming willingness -- even among more vocal war opponents and bloggers -- to give Democrats a pass on actually ending the war (as opposed to enacting symbolic, inconsequential resolutions)?<br /><br />Over the past month or so, I attributed the muted or even non-existent criticism of Democrats to the very sensible proposition that the new Democratic leadership ought to be given some time, a little breathing room, to figure out what they will do and, more challengingly, how they will accomplish it. It is a complex task to put together a legislative strategy that will attract a coalition of legislators -- Democrats and some anti-war Republicans -- sufficient to command a majority. That is not going to happen overnight, and it would be unreasonable to start demanding that Nancy Pelosi end the war in the first week of her Speakership.<br /><br />But that explanation really doesn't take us very far any more, because it is clear that Congressional Democrats are not working at all towards the goal of <span style="font-style: italic;">forcing</span> an end to the war. They have expressly repudiated any de-funding intentions, and -- as Chu and Yoo correctly observe -- "two other Democratic Senate proposals that have actual teeth — one by Russell Feingold to cut off money for the war, another by Barack Obama to mandate troop reductions — were ignored by the leadership." Democrats are not going to be any closer to de-funding the war or otherwise compelling its conclusion in March or May or July as they are now, and they themselves have made that clear. For that reason, the "let's-give-them-time" justification lacks coherence.<br /><br />A more formidable explanation for the lack of criticism of the Democratic leadership is pure pragmatic reality -- a Democratic leadership which can barely scrape up enough votes to pass a weak, non-binding resolution opposing escalation, let alone a non-binding resolution calling for an end to the war, would simply never be able to attract anywhere near enough votes to sustain a de-funding bill or a repeal of the war authorization. That premise is (most likely, though not definitely) accurate, but since when have pragmatic considerations of that sort stifled arguments from war opponents, liberal activists, and bloggers for principled action?<br /><br />Activists and bloggers routinely demand, based both on principle and political strategy, that their political leaders unapologetically embrace the political position that is Right, and do not generally accept the excuse that doing so is politically unpopular or unlikely to succeed. Bloggers and others demanded support for all sorts of important measures that had little chance of success -- opposition to, even a filibuster of the, Alito nomination, opposition to the Military Commissions Act, opposition to the confirmation of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. On an issue as crucial as ending the war in Iraq, is likely legislative failure really a justifiable excuse for failing to push that issue, advocate that as a solution, and force a vote?<br /><br />There are some obvious political considerations that potentially explain the muted objections to Democratic inaction on the war. The most obvious, and the most ignoble, is a desire that the war in Iraq -- as hideously destructive as it is -- still be raging during the 2008 elections, based on the belief that Americans will punish Republicans for the war even more than they did in the 2006 midterm elections. Is that naked political calculation driving some of the unwillingness of some Democratic elected officials to end the war? One would like to think not, but it is growing increasingly more difficult to avoid that suspicion.<br /><br />Then there is the related, somewhat more reasonable political consideration which is grounded in the fear that if Democrats end the war in Iraq, all of the resulting violence and chaos which rightfully belongs in George Bush's lap will instead be heaped on the Democrats ("we were so close to winning if only the Democrats hadn't forced a withdrawal"). It is certainly true that war supporters, desperate to blame someone other than themselves for the disaster they have wrought, would immediately exploit this dishonest storyline, but does that really matter?<br /><br />If ending the war is urgently necessary, is that consideration even remotely sufficient to justify a decision by Democrats to allow it to continue? Isn't that the same rationale that was used by Democrats who voted in favor of the 2002 Iraq AUMF -- "if we oppose it, we will be damaged politically for years to come, and since it will pass anyway, why not support it and avoid incurring that political damage"? It is difficult to reconcile criticism of Congressional Democrats who voted on political grounds in 2002 to authorize the invasion of Iraq with a willingness now to allow them to avoid compelling an end to that war.<br /><br />What does seem clear is that one of the principal factors accounting for the reluctance of Democrats to advocate de-funding is that the standard corruption that infects our political discourse has rendered the de-funding option truly radioactive. Republicans and the media have propagated -- and Democrats have frequently affirmed -- the proposition that to de-fund a war is to endanger the "troops in the field."<br /><br />This unbelievably irrational, even stupid, concept has arisen and has now taken root -- that to cut off funds for the war means that, one day, our troops are going to be in the middle of a vicious fire-fight and suddenly they will run out of bullets -- or run out of gas or armor -- because Nancy Pelosi refused to pay for the things they need to protect themselves, and so they are going to find themselves in the middle of the Iraq war with no supplies and no money to pay for what they need. That is just one of those grossly distorting, idiotic myths the media allows to become immovably lodged in our political discourse and which infects our political analysis and prevents any sort of rational examination of our options.<br /><br />That is why virtually all political figures run away as fast and desperately as possible from the idea of de-funding a war -- it's as though they have to strongly repudiate de-funding options because de-funding has become tantamount to "endangering our troops" (notwithstanding the fact that Congress has <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/09/deployment-funding-limits-congress/">de-funded wars</a> in the past and it is obviously done in coordination with the military and over a scheduled time frame so as to avoid "endangering the troops").<br /><br />As Russ Feingold <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/2/1/161053/9784">explained</a> in a Daily Kos diary announcing his<span style="font-style: italic;"> opposition</span> to the Warner/Levin "anti-surge" resolution:<br /><blockquote><br />We owe it to ourselves to demand action that will bring about change in Iraq, not take us back to a failed status quo.<br /><br />Democrats in Congress have seemingly forgotten that we were in power when Congress authorized the President to go to war in Iraq. . . . We also have to remember that in November, Americans sent over 30 new Democratic Representatives and eight new Democratic Senators plus a very progressive Independent to fix a failed Iraq policy. The public is craving change in Iraq and a resolution like this one will not cut it. Now is the time for strong action.</blockquote><br />Those are the type of arguments which one expects to find among anti-war activists and bloggers, yet one sees relatively little dissatisfaction, and almost no anger, directed at the Democratic leadership for its refusal even to force a vote on genuine war-ending measures. It is unclear why that is -- perhaps there are good reasons for it -- but those reasons are difficult to discern, and these seem like questions worth examining.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: As but one example, MoveOn.org has <a href="http://pol.moveon.org/noescalation/">a page</a> devoted to a petition opposing <span style="font-style: italic;">escalation </span>in Iraq, and also has <a href="http://pol.moveon.org/noescalation/">an ad</a> criticizing Republicans for supporting escalation, but they do not -- from what I can tell -- have any petitions, actions, marches, campaigns, etc. to urge Congress to de-fund the war or otherwise compel a withdrawal of troops from Iraq. They even <a href="http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2007/02/senate-lines-up-behind-nonbinding.html">supported</a> the Warner-Levin resolution which, as Sen. Feingold pointed out, "signs off on the President continuing indefinite military operations in Iraq."http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/giving-democrats-pass-on-ending-war.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117127632173002137Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:23:00 +00002007-02-12T21:15:37.640-02:00Awkward discussions of race and Obama<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below - updated again)</span><br /><br />The luminous roundtable on <span style="font-style: italic;">Meet the Press</span> yesterday had what appears from <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17065119/">the transcript</a> to be a rather awkward discussion of the role of race in Barack Obama's candidacy, with Howard Kurtz <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/11/is-obama-black-enough-huh/">raising a question</a> with which people like <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2158010/&#obamablackvoters">Mickey Kaus</a> and <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2237.php">Glenn</a> <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/01/post_1988.php">Reynolds</a> seem strangely <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/01/post_1923.php">obsessed</a>: "Is [Obama] black enough to get support in the African-American community?" In the middle of that discussion, the Politico's Roger Simon said <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17065119/page/4/">this</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />If America actually nominates him and then votes for him for president and elects him, this will be a sign that we are a good and decent country that has healed its racial wounds. Now, Jesse Jackson had a same subtext, but Barack Obama is a<span style="font-weight: bold;"> much different politician than</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> Jesse Jackson—much less threatening</span>, much more appealing, and he actually has the ability to carry this off.</blockquote><br />One could say, I suppose, that Jesse Jackson was more ideological and further to the left than Obama is -- though I think that is far from clear at this point. But even if one believes that, in what conceivable sense was Jesse Jackson "threatening" in a way that Obama is not? Jackson -- whatever else one might think of him -- is a Christian minister whose speeches almost invariably were grounded in religious concepts of faith, hope, charity, and aiding the impoverished and disadvantaged, and were free of racially inflammatory rhetoric, or any type of notably inflammatory rhetoric. Even for those who disagreed with Jackson politically, in what sense could he be viewed as "threatening"?<br /><br />Anonymous Liberal wrote <a href="http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2007/02/case-for-obama.html">a post</a> this weekend confessing that he has become smitten with Obama, and it is clear from his post that he has indeed succumbed to The Obama Spell. A.L. pronounces that he is "more convinced than ever that Obama is the strongest candidate in the field." After I read A.L.'s post, we exchanged a couple of e-mails about the extent to which Obama's race would be an impediment to his electoral prospects. A.L. thinks that the impediment would be slight, and even might have the opposite effect, on balance, of energizing white voters over the prospect of electing a black president (in his post, he cites Deval Patrick's resounding victory as Masschusettes Governor as evidence of this dynamic).<br /><br />Possibly. But what seems clear, at the very least, is that Obama's candidacy is going to compel very candid discussions of race in venues which typically avoid such discussions desperately, opting instead to pretend that racial issues simply are non-existent. And that, in turn, is going to generate all kinds of revealing and (to put it generously) awkward remarks of the type made by Joe Biden and Roger Simon.<br /><br />Look at how racially charged the "controversies" over Obama have <span style="font-style: italic;">already </span>been -- not only the<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/01/22/obama.madrassa/"> fictitious claims</a> about his "madrassa" education, but also Tucker Carlson's <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200702090009">insinuations</a> over the past few days that Obama's church is too black to be Christian. And ABC News' Jake Tapper and Katie Hinman <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/Politics/story?id=2867210&page=1">took Carlson's innuendo a step further</a> yesterday by claiming that unnamed "critics" want to know if Obama's church "<span class="storytext">is <span style="font-weight: bold;">too militant </span>to be accepted by mainstream America" (h/t rk).<br /><br />That was an insinuation that seemed to echo the very inflammatory claims in <a href="http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&amp;id=254362714252786">this editorial</a> from <span style="font-style: italic;">Investors Business Daily</span>, which asserted that </span>Obama's "religion has little to do with Islam and everything to do with a <span style="font-weight: bold;">militantly Afrocentric movement that's no less troubling</span>." The Editorial added that "Obama embraced more than Christ when he answered the altar call 20 years ago at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Southside Chicago" -- he embraced the "gospel of blackness and black power," a fact which "should give American voters pause." These accusations seem designed to suggest that perhaps Obama is not as "non-threatening" as Simon condescendingly claimed. Maybe he is a <span style="font-style: italic;">black militant.</span><br /><br />It is always preferable to have views and sentiments -- even ugly ones -- aired out in the open rather than forcing them into hiding through suppression. And part of the reason people intently run away from discussions of race (just as they stay away from discussions of Middle East political disputes, specifically ones involving Israel) is because it is too easy to unwittingly run afoul of various unwritten speech rules, thereby triggering accusations of bigotry. That practice has the effect of keeping people silent, which in turn has the effect of reinforcing the appearance that nobody thinks about race (which is why nobody discusses it), which in turn prevents a constructive discussions of hidden and unwarranted premises.<br /><br />For that reason, scouring people's comments about Obama and race, in search of evidence of even minor deviations from speech mores, is not really constructive. But it is notable just how many implicit assumptions about race lurk beneath these observations.<br /><br />And it is even more notable how freely these patronizing sentiments are being expressed in the context of Obama's candidacy, often -- as in Biden's and Simon's case -- expressed as though they are <span style="font-style: italic;">compliments</span> (he is so clean and articulate, he is so non-threatening, he seems like one of the moderate ones, he isn't really "militant"), because the speakers are not even consciously aware of the implications of those assumptions. It can be unpleasant to watch people struggle with these awkward discussions, but, on balance, anything which forces these issues more out into the open is probably a positive development.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: Pam Spaulding has a characteristically nuanced and <a href="http://www.pamshouseblend.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=725">insightful discussion</a> of some of the difficulties which people -- both white and black -- are encountering when discussing race in the context of Obama's candidacy.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE II</u></span>: The Unapologetic Mexican <a href="http://www.theunapologeticmexican.org/elgrito/2007/02/speech_rules.html">takes issue</a> with some of the claims in this post. I left a comment there in response (to which he then responded).http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/awkward-discussions-of-race-and-obama.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117119681704313313Sun, 11 Feb 2007 12:21:00 +00002007-02-11T16:54:47.010-02:00Terry Moran, Michael Gordon and The Mark Halperin Syndrome<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />One of the critical issues which that disgraceful <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/world/middleeast/10weapons.html?hp&ex=1171170000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=e9a9ae56cb1df98a&ei=5094&amp;partner=homepage">Michael Gordon article</a> in yesterday's <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times </span>raises is the extent to which so many national journalists are so eager to prove to right-wing fanatics that they are sympathetic to their agenda. Years of being attacked by the Rush Limbaughs and Sean Hannitys and Bill O'Reillys as being part of the dreaded "liberal media" has created an obsequious need among many journalists to curry favor -- through reporting which echoes right-wing narratives and/or by attacking the "liberal bias" of their fellow journalists -- all in order to avoid being criticized by the right-wing noise machine. <span style="font-style: italic;">That</span> is the defining symptom of The <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/more-on-mark-halperins-sad-little.html">Mark Halperin</a> <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/10/mark-halperin-and-hugh-hewitt-all-you.html">Syndrome</a>.<br /><br />Within hours of publication of Gordon's article in the <span style="font-style: italic;">Times </span>yesterday, there was (and still is) an item on the <a href="http://www.drudgereport.com">Drudge Report</a> in screaming red ink that reads: "Deadliest Bombs in Iraq 'made in Iran,'" with a link to the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYT </span>article. <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MWQ0OGUxM2Y4ZDJkY2UzM2FmNDRkOGI3NGFlYjc2ODE=">War-on-Iran</a> <a href="http://www.julescrittenden.com/2007/02/10/how-very-interesting/">fanatics</a> immediately -- and very predictably -- <a href="http://www.redstate.com/stories/war/too_smart_by_half">seized</a> on Gordon's article as proof of the allegedly grave threat Iran poses. The <span style="font-style: italic;">Times </span>published a transparently one-sided, <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/ny-times-returns-to-pre-iraq-war.html">journalistically irresponsible</a> article with no effect -- and seemingly no purpose -- other than to fuel the pro-Bush right's hunger for war with Iran.<br /><br />The most illustrative case of the Mark Halperin Syndrome -- whereby journalists seek to please the most radical extremists on the right -- is, of course, Halperin's <a href="http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/Transcript_Page.aspx?ContentGuid=1f133562-cfd3-40f8-af2f-129219d59c8d">own pleas</a> on Hugh Hewitt's radio show for Hewitt to recognize that Halperin shares most of the Right's views. But Halperin's ABC News colleague, Terry Moran -- former White House correspondent and current <span style="font-style: italic;">Nightline </span>host -- is a virtual carbon copy of Halperin.<br /><br />Moran revealed himself this week to be all but an appendage of the right-wing blogosphere by <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/terrymoran/2007/02/does_john_edwar.html">mindlessly echoing</a> their efforts to fuel the frivolous Edwards "controversy." But none of that is new. In May, 2005, Moran was also <a href="http://www.radioblogger.com/archives/may.html#000697">interviewed</a> by Hewitt, and just as desperately as Halperin did, Moran sought Hewitt's approval by lending credence to the most baseless and extreme right-wing smears against journalists. This was one exchange they had:<br /><blockquote><br />HH: My brother called me a journalist once during a conversation about this blog. I was offended. That is a general impression among the American military about the media, Terry. Where does that come from?<br /><br />TM: It comes from, I think, a huge gulf of misunderstanding, for which I lay plenty of blame on the media itself<span style="font-weight: bold;">. There is, Hugh, I agree with you, a deep anti-military bias in the media. One that begins from the premise that the military must be lying, and that American projection of power around the world must be wrong.</span> I think that that is a hangover from Vietnam, and I think it's very dangerous.<br /></blockquote><br />Moran's depiction of his own profession as "deep[ly] anti-military" and reflexively opposed to American military force is so persuasive. After all, if there is one lesson that we learned in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it is that the American media is so very, very hostile to the military and reflexively opposed to all assertions of U.S. military force.<br /><br />That was why they unquestioningly printed on their front pages and recited on their news broadcasts every single claim that emanated from the Pentagon, and it is also why they cheered on as loudly and enthusiastically as anyone else the President's glorious march to war. How eager must Moran be to win the Right's approval if -- in 2005 -- he could make the transparently ludicrous claim that his fellow journalists hate the military and hate the use of U.S. military force?<br /><br />Manifestly, Moran -- just like Halperin -- is eager to show that he is pro-military and was desperate to convince Hewitt that he is not one of those dirty anti-American subversive liberals. To achieve that goal, Moran paraded in front of Hewitt and smeared his fellow journalists as being "deep[ly] anti-military" and claimed that they have a "dangerous" hostility to "American projection of power around the world." Identically, Halperin begged Hewitt not to"lump [him] in with people in [his] business who are liberally biased and don’t seem to care about it." <strong></strong><br /><br />It stands to reason that this glaring need of Moran's to please the Hugh Hewitts of the world and to distinguish himself from the leftist, military-hating radicals who dominate the American media will affect the news coverage choices he makes. Echoing the most strident and biased scandal-mongering of the right-wing blogosphere -- as Moran did this week -- is consistent with that personal agenda. By joining in the right-wing lynch mob this week (<span style="font-style: italic;">Does John Edwards Condone Hate Speech?)</span>, Moran got what he obviously craves -- a <a href="http://michellemalkin.com/archives/006847.htm">pat on the head</a> from Michelle Malkin and <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/02/post_2337.php">universal</a> <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2007/02/07/important-action-alert-stop-taking-yourselves-so-seriously/">praise</a> from the <a href="http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2007/02/was-it-love-for-daily-kos-that-finds.html">right-wing</a> <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/rightangle/index.php?id=20669&blog=3&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;title=rightometer_conference_call_with_mccain&more=1&amp;am">fanatics</a> <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZTU2MWYxOWE2ODQwNGNlODdkMzUzNTc4NDU4OGZkN2Y=">driving</a> that story.<br /><br />In the same interview, Hewitt also asked Moran if he reads blogs, and Moran immediately declared: "<span style="font-weight: bold;">I always start out at Instapundit</span>." I bet he does. Next came: "I take a look at LGF." He then tacked on Daily Kos and Josh Marshall as blogs he "looks at," and then proudly added: "My brother has a blog, Right Wing Nut House." Most revealing of all was this exchange:<br /><blockquote><br />HH: What's your guess about the percentage of the White House Press Corps that voted for Kerry?<br /><br />TM: Oh, very high. Very, very high. . . .<br /><br />HH: Who'd you vote for?<br /><br />TM: Well, that's a secret ballot, isn't it?<br /><br />HH: Well, it is. I'm just asking, though.<br /><br />TM: I'd prefer not to answer that.<br /><br />HH: I know you would, but...<br /><br />TM: <span style="font-weight: bold;">It might surprise you,</span> but I'd prefer not to.</blockquote><br />So, after first assuring Hewitt that the vast majority of White House journalists were voting for Kerry, Moran coyly slips in that while he won't expressly say for whom he voted, "it might surprise you." Gee, I really wonder what he was trying to convey to Hewitt with that answer? (The Hewitt interview was nothing new; Ron Brynaert previously <a href="http://whyareweback.blogspot.com/2005/03/stop-lying-abcs-terry-moran-is-no.html">examined</a> why Moran was long the Bush administration's most favored White House correspondent, with a history of questions that made Jeff Gannon look like a tough White House interrogator).<br /><br />What Moran did with Hewitt is exactly the same thing Halperin did -- Halperin also refused to expressly say whether he was a conservative or not, but kept sending transparent signals that, by design, left no doubt (Halperin: "<strong style="font-weight: normal;">Acknowledging the liberal bias that exists in the Old Media -- as John Harris and I do in The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008<span style="font-weight: bold;"> doesn't necessarily prove that I am not liberal, but </span>I would think you would be open to giving me the benefit of the doubt</strong>" and <strong style="font-weight: normal;">"As for your repeated insistence that you could reach no other conclusion but one that says that I am 'very liberal,' I'm sure if you think it over, <span style="font-weight: bold;">you will reconsider</span></strong>").<br /><br />The influence of The Mark Halperin Syndrome on our media cannot be overstated. There is a pervasive desire on the part of many national journalists to prove to the right-wing noise machine that they are not like their horrible, leftist, America-hating, anti-military journalistic colleagues which the Right has so successfully demonized.<br /><br />That syndrome was unquestionably a significant factor influencing the pre-Iraq-war parade of "liberal" pundits and journalists putting on such a public display of how serious and thoughtful and patriotic and pro-military they were by lending support to the President's war claims, or -- as in the case of the Joe Kleins -- suppressing their reservations due to a fear of being depicted as one of the anti-military subversives in the press (and, of course, some of them simply subscribe to the neoconservative ideological agenda).<br /><br />Most troublingly, one sees this same dynamic over and over -- not quite as universally but still pervasively -- when it comes to Iran. The Michael Gordon article from yesterday is so alarming because it stems from this same dangerous and sickly dynamic -- journalists eager to prove to Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt and Bill Kristol that they are on the Right Side by mindlessly accepting any claims from the military and refusing to examine the urgent questions raised by our increasingly war-seeking posture towards Iran -- such as <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter.htm">who are the people</a> pushing for this war, <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/whitehouse200703?currentPage=1">how long</a> have they advocated it, what are their <a href="http://www.newamericancentury.org/Bushletter-040302.htm">motives</a>, and why are war-preventing measures, such as diplomacy, being so vigilantly avoided?<br /><br />Those are questions which would be asked only by those journalists plagued by -- to use Terry Moran's words -- "a deep anti-military bias" and the "dangerous" belief "that American projection of power around the world must be wrong."<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span> By contrast, The Mark Halperins and Terry Morans and Michael Gordons show what good, patriotic boys and girls they are by dutifully passing along what they are told by the Military and the President and the Government without questioning any of it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: The Associated Press <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_IRAN?SITE=NYONI&SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">reports</a> today: "The U.S. military has detected a significant increase in the number of sophisticated roadside bombs in Iraq and believes that orders to send components for them came from <span style="font-weight: bold;">the 'highest levels' of the Iranian government</span>, a senior intelligence officer said Sunday."<br /><br />I don't understand the basis for the somewhat widespread doubt about the fact that the administration is seeking military confrontation with Iran. That seems beyond dispute at this point, and a significant factor determining the outcome of those efforts will be how the American press reports on the claims about Iran coming from the administration and its war-hungry allies.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE II</u></span>: Cernig <a href="http://cernigsnewshog.blogspot.com/2007/02/breaking-us-reveals-iran-evidence.html">documents</a> the fundamental deficiencies in the "case" made by an anonymous military official today that the Iranian government, "at the highest levels," is ordering that Shiite militias be supplied with sophisticated weaponry for use against U.S. forces.<br /><br />Also, what possible justification is there for according anonymity to the Bush officials who are making these claims? The Associated Press report <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17097658/from/RS.1/">says</a> that the official "brief[ed] reporters on condition (sic) that he not be further identified." That is a "condition" that the media ought not accept. These claims are not from whistle blowers or ones which otherwise require anonymity. They are nothing more than the official assertions of the Bush administration to justify its antagonistic posture towards Iran.<br /><br />There is no simply justification for printing articles like this (a) that grant anonymity to the officials disseminating official government claims and (b) without including the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraniraq23jan23,0,4316481.story">ample</a> <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran3feb03,0,2695314.story">evidence</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301577.html">undermining</a> those claims. Have the media learned absolutely nothing from Iraq? It really seems that way.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/terry-moran-michael-gordon-and-mark.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117111285331776510Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:59:00 +00002007-02-10T12:11:10.053-02:00The NY Times returns to pre-Iraq-war "journalism"Over the past few weeks, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Los Angeles <span style="font-style: italic;">Times </span></span>has published several <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraniraq23jan23,0,4316481.story">detailed</a> and <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran3feb03,0,2695314.story">well-documented</a> articles casting serious doubt on the administration's claims that Iran is fueling the Iraqi insurgency with weapons. A couple of months ago,<span style="font-style: italic;"> The Washington Post </span>published a very <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/03/AR2006100301577.html">well-researched article</a> reporting that extensive searches by British military brigades in Southern Iraq -- specifically in the areas where such weapons would almost certainly be transported and maintained -- have turned up nothing. It seemed as though the media was treating the war-inflaming claims of Bush officials against Iran much more skeptically, refusing to simply pass along accusations without first conducting an investigation to determine if those claims were true.<br /><br />But today, <span style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times </span>does precisely the opposite -- it has published a lengthy, prominent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/world/middleeast/10weapons.html?hp&ex=1171170000&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=e9a9ae56cb1df98a&ei=5094&amp;partner=homepage">front-page article</a> by Michael Gordon that does nothing, literally, but mindlessly recite administration claims about Iran's weapons-supplying activities without the slightest questioning, investigation, or presentation of ample counter-evidence. The entire article is nothing more than one accusatory claim about Iran after the next, all emanating from the mouths of anonymous military and "intelligence officials" without the slightest verified evidence, and Gordon just mindlessly repeats what he has been told in one provocative paragraph after the next.<br /><br />Start with the headline: <span style="font-style: italic;">Deadliest Bomb in Iraq is Made by Iran, U.S. Says</span>. That is a proposition that is extremely inflammatory -- it suggests that Iranians bear responsibility for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, even though that is a claim for which almost no evidence has been presented and which is very much in dispute. Why should that be the basis for a prominent headline when Gordon's sole basis for it are the uncorroborated assertions of the Bush administration? The very first paragraph following that headline is the most inflammatory:<br /><blockquote><br />The <span style="font-weight: bold;">most lethal weapon directed against American troops</span> in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being<span style="font-weight: bold;"> supplied by Iran.</span></blockquote><br />Is that extremely provocative claim even true? Gordon never says, and he does not really appear to care. He is in Pravda Spokesman mode throughout the entire article -- offering himself up as a megaphone for administration assertions without the slightest amount of scrutiny, investigation or opposing views.<br /><br />What is the basis for the entire article? Gordon summarizes it this way:<br /><blockquote><br />The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.<br /><br />In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq. </blockquote><br />Every one of Gordon's sources are officials in the Bush administration, and all of them are completely anonymous, so one has no way to assess their interest, perspective, bias, or independence. And Gordon himself does not offer the slightest information to enable the reader to make such determinations, and he himself appears blissfully uninterested in any of that.<br /><br />This is completely irresponsible journalism. The latest <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/012377.php">indications</a>, including new revelations over the last few days, lend <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/012376.php">strong support</a> to the suspicion that the Bush administration is intensifying its preparations for a military confrontation with Iran. The emotional and psychological impact of Gordon's story is glaringly obvious -- if Iranians are purposely supplying Shiite militias with the "most lethal weapon directed against American troops," that obviously will have the effect of heightening anger towards Iranians among Americans and leading them to believe that war against Iran is necessary because they are killing our troops.<br /><br />Gordon recognizes the high stakes of his story, but naively passes this along:<br /><blockquote><br />Any assertion of an Iranian contribution to attacks on Americans in Iraq is both politically and diplomatically volatile. The officials said they were willing to discuss the issue to respond to what they described as an increasingly worrisome threat to American forces in Iraq, and <span style="font-weight: bold;">were not trying to lay the basis for an American attack on Iran.</span></blockquote><br />No, perish the thought. But why are these sources granted anonymity? All they are doing is passing along the standard, official line of the Bush administration, supposedly revealing the most inflammatory conclusions that the administration will "unveil" in just a few days. What possible purpose is served by shrouding these sources in anonymity in order to enable them to pass along these controversial claims with the appearance that Gordon has scored some sort of "scoop" by provoking candid "officials" to speak off the record? This is just Bush administration propaganda dressed up as a "leak" to induce Gordon and the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYT</span> to excitedly publish this on their front page. Judy Miller anyone?<br /><br />Speaking of Judy Miller, the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYT </span>today gives us one paragraph after the next like this one:<br /><blockquote><br />The link that American intelligence has drawn to Iran is based on a number of factors, including an analysis of captured devices, examination of debris after attacks, and<span style="font-weight: bold;"> intelligence on training of Shiite militants</span> in Iran and in Iraq by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and by Hezbollah militants believed to be working at the behest of Tehran. . . .<br /><br />The information includes interrogation reports from the raids indicating that money and weapons components are being brought into Iraq from across the Iranian border in vehicles that travel at night. One of the detainees has identified an Iranian operative as having supplied two of the bombs. The border crossing at Mehran is identified as a major crossing point for the smuggling of money and weapons for Shiite militants, <span style="font-weight: bold;">according to the intelligence</span>.</blockquote><br />Has Gordon reviewed any of those devices, seen any of the debris or the reports describing them, spoken to independent experts about the accuracy of the administration's claims, or evaluated the credibility of the original sources for all of this alleged "intelligence"? If he has done any of that, he does not share any of those assessments in his article. He is simply echoing what he has been told, without regard to its persuasive qualities.<br /><br />In fact, with the exception of one cursory note buried in the middle that the Iranian Government denies supplying Shiite militias with weapons, every paragraph in the article -- every one -- simply echoes accusations by military and other Bush officials that Iran is behind the attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq. If the White House were to prepare one of its famous Position Papers setting forth its case against Iran, it would look exactly like the article Gordon and the <span style="font-style: italic;">NYT</span> just published on behalf of the administration. What is the point of this sort of article? Why would the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times </span>just offer itself up again as a mindless vessel for what are clearly war-seeking accusations by the administration? Have they learned nothing?<br /><br />And all of this is particularly inexcusable in light of the ample analysis and <span style="font-style: italic;">evidence</span> -- already published by the <span style="font-style: italic;">LA Times</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Post</span>, among others -- which raise serious questions about the reliability of the administration's accusations against Iran. There is no excuse whatsoever for writing a long, prominent article summarizing the administration's claims without even alluding to that evidence, let alone failing to conduct any investigation to determine the <span style="font-style: italic;">accuracy</span> of the government's statements.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: As I noted the other day, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span>'s Dan Froomkin published a <a href="http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00156">list of basic journalistic rules</a> for avoiding the media's government-enabling mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq. If the<span style="font-style: italic;"> NYT </span>set out to create a textbook article which violates as many of these principles as possible, it would not have been able to surpass the article published today by Gordon. Here are just a few of Froomkin's rules:<br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">You Can’t Be Too Skeptical of Authority</span><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Don’t assume anything administration officials tell you is true. In fact, you are probably better off assuming anything they tell you is a lie.</li></ul><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Demand proof for their every assertion. Assume the proof is a lie. Demand that they prove that their proof is accurate.</li></ul><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Just because they say it, doesn’t mean it should be make the headlines. The absence of supporting evidence for their assertion -- or a preponderance of evidence that contradicts the assertion -- may be more newsworthy than the assertion itself.</li></ul><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Don’t print anonymous assertions. Demand that sources make themselves accountable for what they insist is true.</li></ul><br /><br /><b>Provocation Alone Does Not Justify War </b><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><br /><br /><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">War is so serious that even proving the existence of a <em>casus belli</em> isn’t enough. Make officials prove to the public that going to war will make things better.</li></ul><br /><br /><b>Be Particularly Skeptical of Secrecy</b><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Don’t assume that these officials, with their access to secret intelligence, know more than you do.</li></ul><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Alternately, assume that they do indeed know more than you do – and are trying to keep intelligence that would undermine their arguments secret.</li></ul><br /><br /><b>Don’t Just Give Voice to the Administration Officials</b><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Give voice to the skeptics; don’t marginalize and mock them.</li></ul><br /><br /><ul style="margin-top: 0in;" type="disc"><li class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Listen to and quote the people who got it right last time: The intelligence officials, state department officials, war-college instructors and many others who predicted the problem we are now facing, but who were largely ignored.</li></ul></blockquote><br />Is there a single journalistic principle which this article did not violate?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE II:</u></span> As Greg Mitchell recalls in an <a href="http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003544369">article</a> in <span style="font-style: italic;">Editor &amp; Publisher</span>, it was Michael Gordon <span class="text">"who, on his own, or with Judith Miller, wrote some of the key, and badly misleading or downright inaccurate, articles about Iraqi WMDs in the run-up to the 2003 invasion," and </span><span class="text">Gordon himself "wrote with Miller the paper's most widely criticized -- even by the Times itself -- WMD story of all, the Sept. 8, 2002, 'aluminum tubes' story that proved so influential, especially since the administration trumpeted it on TV talk shows" (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117111285331776510/#92605">Zack</a>).<br /><br />The fundamental flaws in this article are as glaring as they are grotesque. Given the very ignominious history of Gordon and the NYT concerning the administration's war-seeking claims, how can this article possibly have been published?</span>http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/ny-times-returns-to-pre-iraq-war.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117104462828424012Fri, 09 Feb 2007 17:53:00 +00002007-02-10T13:28:33.920-02:00Calls to investigate the media's pre-war behavior<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />A <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/08/AR2007020802387.html">new report</a> by the Pentagon's Inspector General documents what everyone other than the hardest core Bush followers already knows: namely, that "Intelligence provided by former undersecretary of defense Douglas J. Feith to buttress the White House case for invading Iraq included 'reporting of dubious quality or reliability' that supported the political views of senior administration officials rather than the conclusions of the intelligence community" (<span style="font-weight: bold;">see update below).</span> It is vitally important to ensure that those who were responsible for the deceit that led us into Iraq are identified and held accountable.<br /><br />But that responsibility extends beyond Bush officials into most of the nation's most influential media outlets. Gilbert Cranberg, former Editorial Page Editor of <span style="font-style: italic;">The Des Moines Register</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Tribune</span> and Professor of Journalism at the University of Iowa, has published a <a href="http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=00261">superb article</a> at the excellent Nieman Watchdog site (affiliated with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard), in which he calls for a serious and independent investigation into the profound pre-war failures of our media:<br /><blockquote><br />As the war in Iraq nears its fourth anniversary, and with no end in sight, Americans are owed explanations. . . An explanation is due also for how the U.S. press helped pave the way for war. An independent and thorough inquiry of pre-war press coverage would be a public service. Not least of the beneficiaries would be the press itself, which could be helped to understand its behavior and avoid a replay.<br /></blockquote><br />Cranberg urges an independent investigation rather than "self-policing":<br /><blockquote><br />Better a study by outsiders than by insiders. Besides, journalism groups show no appetite for self-examination. Nor would a study by the press about the press have credibility. Now and then a news organization has published a mea culpa about its Iraq coverage, but isolated admissions of error are no substitute for comprehensive study.</blockquote><br />Cranberg identifies twelve highly relevant, unresolved questions to illustrate the type of areas in need of meaningful inquiry, including:<br /><blockquote><br />* Why did the Knight Ridder Washington Bureau’s “against-the grain reporting” during the build-up to war receive such “disappointing play,” in the words of its former bureau chief?<br /><br />* Why, on the eve of war, did the Washington Post’s executive editor reject a story by Walter Pincus, its experienced and knowledgeable national security reporter, that questioned administration claims of hidden Iraqi weapons and why, when the editor reconsidered, the story ran on Page 17?<br /><br />* Why did the Post, to the “dismay” of the paper’s ombudsman, bury in the back pages or miss stories that challenged the administration’s version of events? Or, as Pincus complained, why did Post editors go “through a whole phase in which they didn’t put things on the front page that would make a difference” while, from August 2002 to the start of the war in March 2003, did the Post, according to its press critic, Howard Kurtz, publish “more than 140 front-page stories that focused heavily on administration rhetoric against Iraq”?<br /><br />* Why did Michael Massing’s critique of Iraq-war coverage, in the New York Review of Books, conclude that “The Post was not alone. The nearer the war drew, and the more determined the administration seemed to wage it, the less editors were willing to ask tough questions. The occasional critical stories that did appear were…tucked well out of sight.”<br /><br />* Why did the Times’s Thomas E. Friedman and other foreign affairs specialists, who should have known better, join the “let’s-go-to-war” chorus?<br /><br />* Why did Colin Powell’s pivotal presentation to the United Nations receive immediate and overwhelming press approval despite its evident weaknesses and even fabrications?<br /><br />* Why did the British press, unlike its American counterpart, critically dissect the speech and regard it with scorn?<br /><br />* Why did the Associated Press wait six months, when the body count began to rise, to distribute a major piece by AP’s Charles Hanley challenging Powell’s evidence and why did Hanley say how frustrating it had been until then to break through the self-censorship imposed by his editors on negative news about Iraq?</blockquote><br />These are all excellent questions, as are the others which Cranberg includes, as are many that are not on his list. And as he notes, none of this is particularly new, particularly when it comes to matters of war and the identification of an "enemy" by the government:<br /><blockquote><br />The shortcomings of Iraq coverage were not an aberration. Similar failure is a recurrent problem in times of national stress. The press was shamefully silent, for instance, when American citizens were removed from their homes and incarcerated solely because of their ancestry during World War II. Many in the press were cowed during McCarthyism’s heyday in the 1950s. Nor did the press dispute the case for the fact-challenged Gulf of Tonkin resolution that led to a greatly enlarged Vietnam war.<br /><br />The press response to the build-up to the Iraq war simply is the latest manifestation of an underlying and ongoing reluctance to dissent from authority and prevailing opinion when emotions run high, especially on matters of war and peace, when the country most needs a questioning, vigorous press.</blockquote><br />Much of this is just basic fear of challenging the prevailing wisdom and assertions of authority, as Elisabeth Bumiller <a href="http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000966.html">infamously admitted</a> and as almost certainly accounts for Joe Klein's willingness to express his allegedly anti-war views <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/my-sixpoint-reaction-to-_b_40570.html">only in private</a>. But the problems are also clearly institutional and have become ingrained in the national media outlets themselves. A truly probing examination of the media's extremely culpable pre-war behavior is, as Cranberg said, urgently needed -- both to prevent future debacles and to shine light on the true causes of our media's dysfunction.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: The <span style="font-style: italic;">Post </span>apparently made the embarrassingly sloppy mistake in its article on the Inspector General's Report of quoting from a previously report issued by Sen. Carl Levin, and <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>the Report issued by the Inspector General. They have appended a correction to the top of the article linked to in the first paragraph.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/calls-to-investigate-medias-pre-war.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117101896875079633Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:51:00 +00002007-02-09T18:24:02.716-02:00The significance of the Edwards story<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />With the merciful (and generally positive) conclusion of the Edwards "controversy," it is worth examining the story's significance and the reasons it merited as much attention as it was given. On several levels, what happened here illustrates some very important developments.<br /><br />For the last 15 years or so -- since the early years of the Clinton administration -- our public political discourse has been centrally driven by an ever-growing network of scandal-mongers and filth-peddling purveyors of baseless, petty innuendo churned out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, various right-wing operatives and, more recently, the right-wing press led by Fox News. Every issue of significance is either shaped and wildly distorted by that process, or the public is distracted from important issues by contrived and unbelievably vapid, petty scandals. Our political discourse has long been infected by this potent toxin, one which has grown in strength and degraded most of our political and media institutions.<br /><br />For anyone who thinks that that is overstated, the definitive refutation is <a href="http://www.drudgereport.com/flash3mh.htm">provided by</a> ABC News Political Director Mark Halperin and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span>'s former National Politics Editor<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>John Harris, who provided this description in their recent book about how their national media world operates:<br /><blockquote><br />Matt Drudge is the gatekeeper... he is the Walter Cronkite of his era.<br /><br />In the fragmented, remote-control, click-on-this, did you hear? political media world in which we live, revered Uncle Walter has been replaced by odd nephew Matt. . . .<br /><br />Matt Drudge rules our world . . . With the exception of the Associated Press, there is no outlet other than the Drudge Report whose dispatches instantly can command the attention and energies of the most established newspapers and television newscasts.<br /><br />So many media elites check the Drudge Report consistently that a reporter is aware his bosses, his competitors, his sources, his friends on Wall Street, lobbyists, White House officials, congressional aides, cousins, and everyone who is anyone has seen it, too.<br /></blockquote><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">This</span> is why our political process has been so broken and corrupt. The worst elements of what has become the pro-Bush right wing have been shaping and driving how national journalists view events, the stories they cover, and the narratives they disseminate.<br /><br />What kind of government and political system -- what kind of country -- is going to arise from a political landscape shaped by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Sean Hannity, Fox News, Michelle Malkin, and their similar right-wing appendages in talk radio, print and the blogosphere? Allowing those elements to dominate our political debates and drive media coverage guarantees a decrepit, rotted, and deeply corrupt country. That is just a basic matter of cause and effect.<br /><br />Peter Daou wrote what I think is one of the <a href="http://blogreport.salon.com/synopsis.aspx?synopsisId=147a2536-4de0-4716-9cc0-6c681e095ffd">definitive articles</a> detailing the mechanics of that process (Tom Tomorrow provided the <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0706,tomorrow,75758,9.html">illustration</a>), but whatever the details, its dominance simply cannot be reasonably doubted. The last two presidential elections were overwhelmed by the pettiest and most fictitious "controversies" (things like Al Gore's invention of the Internet and <span style="font-style: italic;">Love Story</span> claims, John Kerry's windsurfing and war wounds, John Edwards' hair brushing and Howard Dean's scream), and our discussions of the most critical issues are continuously clouded by distortive sideshows concocted by this filth-peddling network. Their endless lynch mob crusades supplant rational and substantive political debates, and the most wild fictions are passively conveyed by a lazy and co-opted national media.<br /><br />In a typically excellent article, Dan Froomkin in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post </span><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/blog/2007/02/08/BL2007020801013.html">this morning</a> explains what Tim Russert's testimony in the Libby trial reveals about how our nation's media stars operate (emphasis in original):<br /><blockquote><br />And get this: According to Russert's testimony yesterday at Libby's trial, when <i style="font-weight: bold;">any</i> senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record.<br /><br />That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable.</blockquote><br />With rare exception, our national press has completely abdicated the function of scrutinizing any of the cheap "scandals" churned out by the right-wing machine because they have merged seamlessly into the political power structures they are supposed to be scrutinizing, or, worse still, they eagerly become an appendage of that machine -- as illustrated, in the Edwards case, by ABC News' Terry Moran's mindless, <a href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/terrymoran/2007/02/does_john_edwar.html">one-sided echoing</a> of the right-wing blogosphere's chatter on this story ("Does John Edwards Condone Hate Speech?") .<br /><br />There are few, if any, more important priorities than creating a counterweight to that network, a method for diluting its influence and exposing and discrediting the people who drive it. And the Edwards story illustrates why that is so and how the blogosphere is beginning to achieve that.<br /><br />The Edwards "controversy" was a story that was concocted at the lowest depths of the right-wing blogosphere, and it then bubbled up through the standard channels until it arrived in the national press. When the story was first reported by <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/us/politics/07edwards.html">The New York Times</a> </span>and the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020601388.html">Associated Press</a>, those outlets mindlessly tracked the right-wing storyline without deviation, and that storyline was designed to convey these familiar themes:<br /><blockquote><br />(1) Liberals hate Christianity and religion generally and are so radical that they actually border on mental illness;<br /><br />(2) The Democratic Party is captive to the hateful, vulgar extremists in the liberal blogosphere;<br /><br />(3) Bill Donohue and Michelle Malkin are vigilant truth-seekers and objective watchdogs, exposing bigotry and radicalism and forcing a reluctant mainstream media to talk about the evil that lurks within the "Left";<br /><br />(4) John Edwards is going to be forced by the all-powerful right-wing crusaders to fire his own staffers and appear weak and bullied.<br /></blockquote><br />That is a storyline that has played out time and again in different contexts, and it was well on its way to being cemented here. It is exactly what would have happened had it not been for the blogosphere, which forced into the public discussion critical facts that were being omitted and which exposed the absurdity of this story, thereby providing a counterweight to the joint right-wing/media pressure on Edwards to capitulate to these forces.<br /><br />As a result, look at the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/us/politics/09bloggers.html?hp&ex=1171083600&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;en=d2c80a9b90b6b0a3&ei=5094&amp;partner=homepage"><span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times </span>story</a> this morning on the conclusion of this matter. The story which ended up being told is significantly different than the one which was being originally peddled. The article includes, for instance, a lengthy passage about the ethically suspect and extremist, offensive writings of John McCain's blogger:<br /><blockquote><br />Last summer, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, hired Patrick J. Hynes, a conservative blogger and political consultant, to be his campaign’s blog liaison. Mr. Hynes quickly ran afoul of fellow bloggers by initially concealing his relationship to the McCain campaign while he was writing critically about other Republicans.<br /><br />He then came under fire for declaring that the United States was a “Christian nation” in a book and television appearances that predated his work for Mr. McCain. Last November, while employed by Mr. McCain’s campaign, Mr. Hynes posted on his personal blog a picture of Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, and invited readers to submit nicknames, some of which were anti-Semitic.<br /><br />In an interview, Mr. Hynes said the Internet was a place where overheated language and vicious personal attacks were often tolerated, even encouraged. But, he said, “I would caution against holding candidates responsible for what their bloggers and blog consultants have said in the past.”<br /><br />“The blogosphere is a conversation; it’s not reportage,” Mr. Hynes said. “We’re all trying to figure out, what does this mean for the convergence of all these media? It’s a Pandora’s box and no one knows where it’s going to end up.”<br /><br />Mr. Hynes remained on the McCain campaign staff and maintained his personal blog.</blockquote><br />A story invented and driven by the right-wing blogosphere resulted in a prominent discussion in <span style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times </span>of the serious ethical lapses and extremist views of John McCain's personal blogger, and even the presence of anti-semitic slurs against Henry Waxman by that blogger's readers in the right-wing blogosphere. McCain's own blogger was thus forced defensively to contradict the central premise of the right-wing scandal: "I would caution against holding candidates responsible for what their bloggers and blog consultants have said in the past."<br /><br />Earlier versions of that <span style="font-style: italic;">Times </span>story (I believe) -- as well as <a href="http://www.wral.com/news/state/story/1197172/">other press accounts</a> by reporters who originally echoed the right-wing narrative -- also ended up featuring excerpts of statements made in the past by Bill Donohue which reveal what a profoundly inappropriate and discredited source he is on any topic, let alone for sitting as arbiter over which viewpoints are too offensive for the mainstream. And <a href="http://salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/08/bloggers_rehired/">multiple stories</a> credited the liberal blogosphere -- <a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/48337">citing</a> MyDD and Chris Bowers -- as the effective shield against demands that Edwards sacrifice these bloggers at the altar of Michelle Malkin, Bill Donohue and Fox News.<br /><br />The blogosphere fundamentally altered the arc of this story. All of the balancing information which made its way into the national press within a very short period of time was <a href="http://mydd.com/story/2007/2/8/17574/09512">found by bloggers</a>, <a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_02_04_atrios_archive.html#117096751264957941">amplified</a> <a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_02_04_atrios_archive.html#117086488087894194">by</a> <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/7/122247/4086">other</a> <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/7/121926/4650">bloggers</a> and by groups such as <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200702070007">Media</a> <a href="http://mydd.com/story/2007/2/8/17574/09512">Matters</a>, and that shaped the story -- both how it was discussed and its ultimate outcome -- in numerous ways. And it re-inforced the idea that the rotted network composed of the Michelle Malkins and Bill O'Reillys and Bill Donohues cannot drive media stories unilaterally anymore and cannot force major presidential candidates to capitulate to their demands.<br /><br />It is still the case that the political impressions of most Americans are shaped by how our dominant media outlets discuss political issues. That is true for every issue from the seemingly inconsequential (staffing decisions of the Edwards campaign) to whatever issue you want to say is the "most important" -- Iraq, Iran, presidential power, debates over domestic policy, and everything in between. How the national media reports on all of these matters, which sources they depict as credible, and the factions that influence and shape that reporting is still <span style="font-style: italic;">the single most influential factor </span>in the outcome of all political disputes.<br /><br />We are in the position we are in as a country because there has been really no effective counterweight to the lowly, deceitful and filth-peddling right-wing network which has dominated our political discourse and the media's coverage of it. That is clearly changing -- slowly perhaps, though still meaningfully (which is why the Edwards campaign felt sufficiently comfortable in defying these pressures, and it is also why -- as <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span>'s Ana Marie Cox <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/02/all_the_wonderful_things_the_b.html">surprisingly acknowledges</a> (while linking to <a href="http://www.firedoglake.com/2007/02/07/7083/">FDL</a>) -- the most astute and insightful reporting on the Libby trial (and so many other news items) is coming from the blogosphere, not the national press).<br /><br />As long as Matt Drudge -- and Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, etc. -- rule the world of national journalists, little can be accomplished on any front. Diluting their influence and forcing actual facts into these public discussions is of the utmost urgency, and the growing (though admittedly still incomplete) ability of the blogosphere to achieve that objective is the true significance of the Edwards story.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: For a highly representative sampling of the bulging corruption that drives our national media, see this "<a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_digbysblog_archive.html#117104726853772542">debate</a>" on MSNBC today concerning the Edwards controversy. MSNBC had an extremely balanced panel of one Republican strategist and one "Democratic" strategist -- Lieberman crony Dan Gerstein -- who, needless to say, agreed on everything (the right-wing protesters were completely right and Edwards made a horrible choice that will doom him). There was not a peep in dissent from anyone.<br /><br />Pay particular attention to the morbidly hilarious last line of the exchange. This brings back memories of all of those pre-war "debates" between all sorts of experts and pundits whose only source of disagreement was whether we should invade Iraq in March or in April.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/significance-of-edwards-story.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117095444033052548Thu, 08 Feb 2007 17:06:00 +00002007-02-08T22:07:35.166-02:00Statement of the Edwards campaign<b>(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)<br /><br />Subject:</b> EDWARDS STATEMENT ON CAMPAIGN BLOGGERS AMANDA MARCOTTE AND MELISSA McEWEN<br /><b><br />FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE</b><br /><br />February 8, 2007<br /><br />EDWARDS STATEMENT ON CAMPAIGN BLOGGERS AMANDA MARCOTTE AND MELISSA McEWEN<br /><br />Chapel Hill, North Carolina -- The statements of Senator John Edwards, Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen in reference to their work as independent bloggers before joining the Edwards campaign are below.<br /><br /><b>Senator John Edwards:</b><br /><br />"The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwan's posts personally offended me. It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor, or anything else. But I also believe in giving everyone a fair shake. I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word. We're beginning a great debate about the future of our country, and we can't let it be hijacked. It will take discipline, focus, and courage to build the America we believe in."<br /><br /><b>Amanda Marcotte:</b><br /><br />"My writings on my personal blog, Pandagon on the issue of religion are generally satirical in nature and always intended strictly as a criticism of public policies and politics. My intention is never to offend anyone for his or her personal beliefs, and I am sorry if anyone was personally offended by writings meant only as criticisms of public politics. Freedom of religion and freedom of expression are central rights, and the sum of my personal writings is a testament to this fact."<br /><br /><b>Melissa McEwen:</b><br /><br />"Shakespeare's Sister is my personal blog, and I certainly don't expect Senator Edwards to agree with everything I've posted. We do, however, share many views - including an unwavering support of religious freedom and a deep respect for diverse beliefs. It has never been my intention to disparage people's individual faith, and I'm sorry if my words were taken in that way."<br /><br />_______________________________________________<br /><br />This was a smart and potentially significant move by the Edwards campaign on several levels, the most significant of which is that it signals that Democratic campaigns aren't going to capitulate to contrived controversies manufactured by the lowest and basest precincts in our political culture. There is more Edwards could have done with this, but still, he stood resolute in the face of an intense and ugly coordinated media/right-wing swarm and rendered it impotent.<br /><br />Nobody is going to be casting their votes a year from now based on the pre-campaign postings of Amanda Marcotte or Melissa McEwan, and the only ones who will ever speak of this again would never have voted for Edwards in the first place, and only raised these issues in the first place with the intent to harm Edwards specifically and Democrats generally. That faction is the <span style="font-style: italic;">last one</span> to which Edwards and other Democrats ought to pay any attention. John McCain will have to spend the next year pandering to the Bill Donahues and Michelle Malkins of the world. There is no reason John Edwards should, and it is good to see that he will not.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: The Associated Press' Nedra Pickler writes a much more <a href="http://www.wral.com/news/state/story/1197172/">balanced article</a> on this matter than the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/06/AR2007020601388.html">one</a> which made its way yesterday into <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span>. In today's story, Pickler conveys the important point made by McEwan on her blog that McEwan enthusiastically voted for a Catholic (John Kerry) for President in 2004, which suggests that she is hardly an "anti-Catholic bigot."<br /><br />It is true that McEwan opposes <span style="font-style: italic;">specific Catholic doctrine applied by some right-wing Catholics to political questions</span>, which -- despite Bill Donohue's best efforts -- is <span style="font-style: italic;">not</span> the same as being "anti-Catholic" (just as opposing Pat Robertson's political agenda does not make one "anti-Christian," nor does opposing the policies of specific right-wing Israelis or American Jews make one "anti-semitic," nor does opposing specific views of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton make one "racist"). The language they used was inflammatory -- almost certainly deliberately so -- but that hardly makes it "bigoted."<br /><br />Pickler also includes -- as she and <span style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times </span>should have done originally -- a small though illustrative excerpt from that Civility Crusader, Bill Donohue: "Donohue also doesn't shy away from blunt language sometimes in his criticism of gays, Hollywood's control by 'secular Jews who hate Christianity' and even the Edwards bloggers, whom he referred to as 'brats' in an interview Wednesday on MSNBC." <span style="font-style: italic;">That </span>(along with Michelle Malkin and the <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news_08.html">likes of Jonah Goldberg</a>)<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>is who was masquerading as the Guardians of Elevated Political Discourse, and that is why it was so important not to indulge this charade.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE II</u></span>: In Comments, Zack <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117095444033052548/?dt=1170987497#91860">says</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />This is all a big game to the right, and they were prepared to declare victory no matter what Edwards did. Edward’s careful response seems to have taken away the “anti-Catholic bigotry” from most of them (Donahue excepted, I’m sure), but they’ve now found a new tact.<br /><br />Sister Toldjah loves this comment:<br /><blockquote><br /><em>This is just a great endorsement for Edwards for President. If he doesn’t have the stones to stand up to the nutroots, I’m sure he’ll really be just the perfect man to stand up to Islamic Terrorists and Iran and North Korea. He’ll need a pair of knee pads pronto if he becomes President.</em><br /></blockquote><br />Did you notice how fast they switched gears? They’ve already nearly forgotten about the religious angle that they began with. ….. Yeah, well, okay, maybe he’s not an anti-Christian bigot, but by gosh he sure is a girly-man.<br /><br />This wasn’t ever about “God-cum” - it was about intimidating those who disagree with them. If one smear doesn’t stick, they’ll just keep throwing them until one does. It’s a game they play to divert attention from the real issues and provide amusement for each other with their insults.</blockquote><br />Other than screeching that the Terrorists are coming to get us all and that anyone who disagrees is themselves a Terrorist, the pro-Bush right has no ideas, no policies, no substance. They thrive on deeply personal lynch mob behavior -- waving purple hearts with band-aids, prattling on about John Kerry's joke and Nancy Pelosi's plane, searching for new scalps to satisfy their mob cravings, and depicting their political opponents as weak, girly, traitorous losers. That is the extent of them, and that is all this Edwards hysteria was ever about. And by brushing it aside, Edwards treated it as the petty nuisance it is, rather than endowing it and them with unwarranted credibility.<br /><br />The idea that the right wing political movement in this country -- led by the filth-spewing likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Little Green Footballs, the Clinton impeachment obsessives, and all sorts of Daily Treason Accusers -- is committed to high levels of civility in our political discourse and sensitivity to the beliefs of others, and therefore was very, very offended by the commentary of these bloggers, is an absurd and transparent joke.<br /><br />There is a reason that two of the most bigoted and offensive public figures in our political landscape -- <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_digbysblog_archive.html#117096650807114758">Bill Donohue</a> and <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200702080001">Michelle Malkin</a> -- led their crusade. That Donohue and Malkin were holding themselves out as the arbiter of proper political discourse and anti-bigotry standards reveals all one needs to know about the corrupt roots of this "controversy."<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE III</u></b>: Over at <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span>'s Media Blog, Steve Spruiell <a href="http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2YyZDAzMWY0YTFkMGJhN2YyY2RkZDZhNzExOGYwZGQ=">speculates</a> (accurately, I believe):<br /><blockquote><br />This [Edwards announcement today] contradicts a report <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/02/07/edwards_bloggers/index.html">on Salon.com yesterday</a> that the Edwards campaign had fired the bloggers.<br /><br />I've previously been interviewed by Alex Koppelman (one of the Salon reporters who wrote the story), and from my experience with him he seems like a diligent and professional reporter — indicating that Salon's report was probably well-founded. So at one point, it's likely that the Edwards campaign <em>had </em>decided to fire the bloggers, only to reconsider in the face of <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2007/02/07/important-action-alert-stop-taking-yourselves-so-seriously/">pressure from left-wing netroots activists</a>.<p></p></blockquote><br />I also believe (without knowing for certain, though based on numerous facts) that this is, more or less, what happened. In the age where candidates listened only to their Beltway consultants, and national journalists were the exclusive gatekeeper and megaphone for all political opinion, I believe virtually every campaign would have fired these bloggers immediately. Why risk the controversy over low-level staffers, the super-smart consultant-rationale would have suggested.<br /><br />But now there are multiple and disparate constituencies, and I don't think there is much question that the blogosphere enabled Edwards to keep these bloggers. I do not believe bloggers forced him to do something he did not want to do. I think it's more likely that the blogosphere created the option of keeping them and enabled Edwards to choose that option, though certainly the prospect of alienating all of the liberal blogosphere -- bloggers, readers and donors alike -- was a factor in Edwards' decision, and it should have been. Candidates should listen more to the people supporting their campaign and less to the national journalists and consultant class which previously dictated all of their decisions.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE IV</u></span>: <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>'s Koppelman and Traister just posted a <a href="http://salon.com/news/feature/2007/02/08/bloggers_rehired/">new article</a> essentially confirming the above theory:<br /><blockquote><br />After personal phone calls to the bloggers from the candidate, the Edwards campaign has rehired the bloggers who were fired yesterday, according to sources inside and close to the campaign.<br /><br />Salon <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/02/07/edwards_bloggers/index.html">reported</a> yesterday that on Wednesday morning the Edwards camp fired Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, the two bloggers whose hiring had sparked an uproar by conservatives. That information was confirmed by sources in and close to the campaign. But almost as soon as the decision had been communicated to the bloggers, a struggle arose within the campaign about possibly reversing it, the sources said, as the liberal blogosphere exploded.</blockquote><br />As I said, I think that reflects well on both the Edwards campaign and, even more so, on the emerging ability of the blogosphere to positively influence the outcome of matters such as this one.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/statement-of-edwards-campaign.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117093444398700627Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:29:00 +00002007-02-08T12:02:24.176-02:00Gen. Pace: they "don't have a clue how democracy works"<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />That <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/07/AR2007020702550.html">this</a> is even notable at all, or that it has to be said, is by itself significant:<br /><blockquote><br />A top Pentagon leader weighed in yesterday on the war debate and appeared to undercut the argument advanced by the White House and many GOP lawmakers that a congressional debate challenging the Bush plan would hurt troop morale.<br /><br /><b>"There's no doubt in my mind that the dialogue here in Washington strengthens our democracy. Period," Marine Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,</b> testified before the House Armed Services Committee. He added that potential enemies may take some comfort from the rancor but said they <span style="font-weight: bold;">"don't have a clue how democracy works."</span></blockquote><br />It is not, of course, only "potential enemies" who "don't have a clue how democracy works." The same can be said for <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002405.php">Dick Cheney</a>, <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/toxicity-of-joe-liebermans-treason.html">Joe Lieberman</a> and their <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2007/01/21/kristol-iraq-quiet/">most extremist</a> <a href="http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/g/f2010221-89c7-4c6b-a351-5c48d2ba61fc">war supporters</a> who spent the last month insisting that debates over the Leader's decisions must be stifled and that those who express opposition are helping the Enemy. The spectacle of watching American political leaders and their loyal pundit-allies instruct Americans of their duties to "be quiet for six or nine months" with regard to the Leader's actions is almost too extreme for words.<br /><br />One of the more egregious examples of not "having a clue of how democracy works" -- independent through related -- is documented <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=78795">here</a> by Isaac Chotiner, who highlights remarks by former federal prosecutor and current <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review </span>commentator Andrew McCarthy, in which McCarthy accuses <span style="font-style: italic;">pro bono </span>lawyers for Guantanamo detainees of "volunteering to help the enemy use [] our courts as a weapon of war against us" (and, just incidentally, someone should ask former prosecutor Rudy Giluiani his view of that particular controversy). That was preceded by The Corner's Clifford May's dissemination of <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Zjg3YWUzNWU1MjgxNDI2OTE1MjQ1MmI5ZjNiMDkxNTg=">absolutely reckless</a> and <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzY1ODU5ODk1MjU1OTI4MTU1YmViYzkwOTdlNTNiYzU=">fact-free innuendo</a> that these lawyers are receiving secret payments from Saudi Arabia and other Terrorists helpers.<br /><br />It is only those who are losing a debate who have a desire to suppress it. And it is only those who are acting illegally who are desperate to avoid judicial scrutiny of their behavior. In 2002, attempts to equate scrutiny and criticism of the Bush movement with pro-Terrorism and anti-Americanism was a potent and effective tool of intimidation. But now, it just seems desperate, the last gasps of a political movement which is dying and which knows it is, and whose only hope is to forcibly coerce acceptance of their views -- and foreclose examination of them -- by insisting that open debates are themselves improper and therefore must cease at once.<br /><br />That rationale is the hallmark of every petty tyrant, and (as surging anti-war sentiment and the last election demonstrate) most Americans, when freed from exploitive fear-mongering, instinctively recoil from it. When even the Bush administration's top General publicly repudiates their principal weapon of coercion, it is a clear sign of how weakened and discredited they have become.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: I'm reminded in comments that Anonymous Liberal has written the <a href="http://anonymousliberal.com/2007/02/paranoia-and-authoritarianism-at.html">definitive post</a> on the matter of the Guantanamo lawyers, the threats directed at them by Bush Pentagon official Cully Stimson, and the smearing of them by <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review </span>Cornerites, including (needless to say) Mark Steyn.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/gen-pace-they-dont-have-clue-how.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117093055806046100Thu, 08 Feb 2007 10:25:00 +00002007-02-08T16:43:05.760-02:00Blog news<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)</span><br /><br />In order to finalize a few remaining design and functionality issues, this blog's <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news.html">move to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span></a>, originally scheduled for today, will instead take place this Monday, February 12.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>: In the meantime, Steve Benen <a href="http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/9863.html">provides</a> some suggestions for stories for intrepid reporters who are interested in exploring the connection between political figures and hate-spewing pundits.<br /><br />And in one paragraph, TBogg <a href="http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2007/02/waiting-on-rimshot.html">illustrates</a> the true and obvious absurdity at the core of the "Edwards controversy":<blockquote><br />Rick "The Lesser" Moran writes about Amanda:<br /><blockquote><br />Her writing is full of so many half truths, manufactured criticisms, dead-wrong assumptions, and a child like ignorance of the emotional universe inhabited by normal men and women that trying to decipher her scribblings – once you can get by the obscenities and work your way through the incoherence – is a task best left to a psychiatrist.<br /></blockquote><br />...and then he invites his readers to go see the ever-sensible Michelle Malkin and Dan Riehl.<br /><br />I could have stayed up all night and not come up with anything near that funny...</blockquote><br />It would be as if <span style="font-style: italic;">The New York Times </span>published <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/07/us/politics/07edwards.html">a story</a> about how the Edwards campaign found itself "in hot water" over offensive comments -- all based on complaints <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200702070005">from Bill Donohue</a> -- or if a political movement whose leading pundit was Rush Limbaugh was able to spark controversy by pretending to be upset by vulgar and offensive remarks from bloggers.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE II</u></span>: An earnest, pious Jonah Goldberg, <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MDRiOWQ0OTI3MzQ2YzYyMjA1NDRiYThmZWQ1ODMyN2Q=">today</a>, on how his political voice "as a writer" has "grown up":<br /><blockquote><br />You know, Jim [Geraghty] <em>does</em> make a good case [<a href="http://hillaryspot.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MjEzOWY4MzhkMGE2OGExOWRiZTc4ZWU1ZGEzYjY3NjI=">that this</a> controversy will make online political debates more civil] and I hope he's right. I think about this a lot. I get a lot of grief from longtime readers about how I've "matured" or "grown up." And the truth is I have. Though I still think there's a lot of room left for humor (and once the book's done and put to bed, I'll bring back some pull-my-finger G-Filing), I'm basically burnt out on the smash-mouth stuff. When I criticize younger lefty bloggers for their excesses, I get a lot of "Hello Mr. Kettle, pot's calling on line one" grief. That's all fair to a point. But the basic fact is <span style="font-weight: bold;">I don't do that stuff very much any more because it's cliched and boring to me . . .</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Simply as a writer, when I see the nasty stuff now, on both the left and the right, my first reaction is to think how </span><em style="font-weight: bold;">easy</em><span style="font-weight: bold;"> — and therefore uninteresting — it is.</span> The Edwards bloggers' anti-Catholic diatribes bore me more than they offend me because they are precisely the sort of thing you'd expect to hear from a living cliche who can't imagine the other side might be worth listening too.<br /></blockquote><br />Jonah Goldberg's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-Totalitarian-Temptation-Mussolini/dp/0385511841/sr=8-1/qid=1170941813/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-9209151-5980433?ie=UTF8&s=books">Regnery book</a>, to be released at some point, presumably:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/1600/450512/jonah.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/320/739154/jonah.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br />From the publisher's description of Jonah's book (the subtitle is <span style="font-style: italic;">The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton</span>):<br /><blockquote><br />LIBERAL FASCISM offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg shows that the original fascists were really on the Left and that liberals, from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton, <span style="font-weight: bold;">have advocated policies and</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism. . . . he boldly illustrates the resemblances between the opinions advanced by Hitler and Mussolini and the current views of the Left.</span></blockquote><br />I know this point has been made before, but this Edwards "controversy" and the accompanying lectures are really just too much to bear. We should absolutely not be hearing sermons about civility in our political discourse and how much one has "grown up" from someone who is about to release a book "documenting" how his political opponents "advocate[] policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler’s National Socialism."<br /><br />The tiniest amount of shame and self-awareness would prevent a lecture like that. But that is what this whole "Edwards controversy" is -- protests over incivility from a political movement that spent several years talking about the spots on Bill Clinton's penis and which, as its principal debating weapon, routinely labels their political opponents traitors, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unhinged-Exposing-Liberals-Gone-Wild/dp/0895260301/sr=8-1/qid=1170942477/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-9209151-5980433?ie=UTF8&s=books">lunatics</a>, <a href="http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/02/limbaugh-and-cockroaches.html">cockroaches</a>, and Nazis -- or "<a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/angry-uncivil-liberal-bloggers.html">the C word.</a>" That the press falls for it without pointing out the practices of those who are complaining is, quite candidly, just maddening.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE III</u></span>: More of Jonah's civil, substantive, adversary-respecting form of argumentation is <a href="http://www.matthewyglesias.com/archives/2007/02/jonah_goldberg_day/">here</a>. As you read that, keep in mind that this is the same person who wrote today about how much he hopes Marcotte and McEwan are fired because they drag down the elevated political discourse in our "Republic."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE IV</u></span>: Leon Wolf of the Bush-loving blog RedState <a href="http://www.redstate.com/stories/blogosphere/an_exciting_day_for_one_of_our_own">has been hired</a> as the "e-campaign coordiantor" by the Sam Brownback campaign. Please forward by email, or leave in comments, any worthwhile material from Leon's past writings.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE V</u></span>: A small but <a href="http://redstate.com/stories/archived/brownback_decides_to_run#comment-364299">amusing start</a>: From Leon Wolf, upon Brownback's announcement two short months ago (emphasis added): "I'm an unabashed Brownback supporter - I just donated to his PAC, but <span style="font-weight: bold;">when (not if) he loses</span>, I'll get on board with the winner, unless the winner is Rudy. Romney and McCain are not my first choices, but they're 'good enough,' I suppose" (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117095444033052548/#91771">Crust</a>). As Crust notes: "Doing a Google site search of redstate.com for "Leon H Wolf" gets <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&amp;rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=qQX&amp;q=site%3Aredstate.com+%22Leon+H+Wolf%22&amp;btnG=Search">42,500</a> hits, so there's a lot of source material out there. His list of stories runs to <a href="http://www.redstate.com/stories/3514?page=39">39 pages</a>, but the juiciest stuff is likely in his comments."http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news_08.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117080384800456713Tue, 06 Feb 2007 23:06:00 +00002007-02-06T21:35:06.810-02:00A new Beltway term -- "Oversight"It has been six long, dysfunctional years since it made an appearance in Washington, so one can be forgiven if one has forgotten what it looks like, but this thing called Congressional "oversight" over administration conduct is now returning to Washington. Henry Waxman convened a hearing today, with former Iraq proconsul Paul Bremer as the featured witness, to begin looking into war profiteering in Iraq, and specifically, how much money was squandered through corruption and cronyism on Iraq's "reconstruction".<br /><br />This was just the first day, and there is nothing cataclysmic, but several excerpts from the hearing illustrate the importance and potential potency of oversight in uncovering wrongdoing by the Executive branch. The first clip entails an examination of the shoddy accounting supervision and cronyism which ensured that there was no meaningful supervision over the expenditure of funds.<br /><br /><object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpOE-ew8ULA"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QpOE-ew8ULA" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="350" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />The second clip entails what Chairman Waxman has made clear is but the start of what will be their aggressive investigation into <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/16/AR2006091600193_pf.html">this report</a> by <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post </span>that the politically appointed Pentagon official in charge of CPA hiring, Jim O'Beirne (husband of <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span>'s Kate O'Beirne) used a litmus test of political loyalty, rather than competence, to fill those positions:<br /><blockquote><br />Applicants didn't need to be experts in the Middle East or in post-conflict reconstruction. What seemed most important was loyalty to the Bush administration. . . . To recruit the people he wanted, O'Beirne sought résumés from the offices of Republican congressmen, conservative think tanks and GOP activists. He discarded applications from those his staff deemed ideologically suspect, even if the applicants possessed Arabic language skills or postwar rebuilding experience.<br /><br />Smith said O'Beirne once pointed to a young man's résumé and pronounced him "an ideal candidate." His chief qualification was that he had worked for the Republican Party in Florida during the presidential election recount in 2000."<br /></blockquote><br />As Steve Gilliard <a href="http://stevegilliard.blogspot.com/2004/05/why-iraq-is-not-working.html">noted</a>: "<span class="body-copy">People like [National Review's] Michael Ledeen's daughter, Simone, were given the task of rebuilding Iraq's economy."</span><br /><br /><object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/dN5GgbArbT8"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dN5GgbArbT8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="350" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br /><br />This last clip illustrates the empty promises made by the administration to provide better supervision and coordination for the reconstruction expenditures:<br /><br /><object height="350" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/Jb2fM6wJz4U"><param name="wmode" value="transparent"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Jb2fM6wJz4U" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" height="350" width="425"></embed></object><br /><br />Again, this was just the first day. And this is one topic. But aggressive oversight -- relentless pursuit of information, compelled disclosure and testimony via subpoena, confrontation between the branches regarding oversight powers of Congress - - can be a very potent weapon for shining light on what this administration has been doing for the last six years while its obscenely loyal, duty-abdicating Congressional servants purposely looked the other way. When conducted the right way, these hearings can be dramatic, publicity-generating, and leave a lasting impression in the public mind. There are many worthy and necessary areas awaiting meaningful inquiry.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/new-beltway-term-oversight.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117076847625028995Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:20:00 +00002007-02-06T23:57:19.850-02:00Rudy Giuliani's compatibility with the Republican Christian base<span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">(updated below - Update II - Update III)<br /><br /></span>Kevin Drum <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_02/010686.php">voices</a> what seems to be the prevailing sentiment regarding Rudy Giuliani: "I don't think Giuliani has the faintest chance of winning a presidential contest in 2008, which is the reason I insisted a few days ago that the Republican field was so poor this cycle." I think the opposite is true -- Giuliani is by far the most formidable, and most dangerous, Republican candidate, and the notion that he cannot win the Republican nomination is grounded in several myths.<br /><br />There is a widespread assumption that within the Republican "base" -- specifically among the party's religious "conservatives" -- there are two distinct categories of issues: (a) foreign policy issues (relating to terrorism, Iraq, etc.) and (b) issues of religion and morality (gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, etc.). Conventional wisdom holds that Giuliani's views on the former are acceptable, even exciting, for the base, but his views on the latter are anathema to them, even fatal to his chances for attracting their support.<br /><br />But for the bulk of religious conservatives, foreign policy issues are <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">not </span>distinct from religious and moral issues. Our Middle East foreign policy is a critical, really the predominant, item on their moral and religious agenda. Among the Christian right, aggressive, war-seeking policies in the Middle East -- specifically against Muslim religiosity and Israel's enemies -- are embraced on moral and theological grounds far more than on geopolitical grounds.<br /><br />James Dobson was a leading advocate of the invasion of Iraq, <a href="http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0209/18/lkl.00.html">telling</a> Larry King as early as September, 2002:<br /><blockquote><br />KING: What do you make of going into Iraq? Does any part of that question your Christian values about going to war?<br /><br />DOBSON: No, not at all. It doesn't. No, I -- you know Saddam Hussein is a tyrant, and he is out of the mold of Hitler and Stalin and others. And you can't negotiate with a tyrant. One who is blood thirsty, one who's willing to kill innocent people. You can't do that. And he'll take your shorts if you try. And I think there's only one thing to do, and that's go in there and confront him. I just can't imagine Adolf Hitler negotiating in good faith or Stalin or Pol Pot or any of the other tyrants.</blockquote><br />For Dobson, the impact of 9/11 on America was primarily spiritual: “we had this resurgence of patriotism and this renewed religious faith, belief in God,” and it was that “renewed religious faith” which drove him to urge that the U.S. wage war on the Evil tyrant. In the same interview, Dobson said: “I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture.”<br /><br />Since 9/11, various incidents (Ann Coulter's demand to convert Muslim countries to Christianity, Gen. Boykin's casting of the War on Terror in terms of a religious war, Franklin Graham's administration-supported conversion efforts, the controversy sparked by Pope Benedict's anti-Muslim commentary, even the President's view of his policies as a "crusade") have left no doubt that, in key isolated Bush-supporting circles, the “War on Terror” – and specifically more wars on more Islamic states such as Iran – is supported because such wars are seen as religious wars to be waged in defense of Christianity. Some of the most aggressive advocates of war against not only Iraq but also Iran prominently include leading Christian evangelicals, who have stressed the centrality of these hawkish foreign policy views to their moral and religious agenda.<br /><br />As <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The New York Times </span><a href="http://www.refuseandresist.org/war/art.php?aid=2488">reported</a> late last year, Rev. John Hagee "called the conflict [between Hezbollah and Israel] 'a battle between good and evil' and said support for Israel was 'God's foreign policy.'" Gary Bauer said of Iran's President Ahmadinejad: "I am not sure there is a foreign leader who has made a <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">bigger splash in American culture since Khrushchev, certainly among committed Christians,</span>' he said."<br /><br />In a March, 2002 speech, Oklahama Sen. James Inhofe <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19590">blamed</a> the 9/11 attacks on America's insufficiently supportive "spiritual" posture towards Israel: “One of the reasons I believe the spiritual door was opened for an attack against the United States was that the policy of our government has been to ask the Israelis, and demand it with pressure, not to retaliate against the terrorist strikes that have been launched against them."<br /><br />Giuliani's talent for expressing prosecutor-like righteous anger towards "bad people" -- as well as his well-honed ability to communicate base-pleasing rhetoric towards Islamic extremists -- are underappreciated. I don't think any candidate will be able to compete with his ability to convey a genuine hard-line against Middle Eastern Muslims (see <a href="http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/10/11/rec.giuliani.prince/index.html">here</a> for one representative maneuver), and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">that </span>is the issue that -- admittedly with some exceptions -- dominates the Christian conservative agenda more than gay marriage and abortion (concerns which he can and will minimize by promising to appoint more Antonin Scalias and Sam Alitos to the Supreme Court, something he emphasized last night in a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMAXw3ZZuYU">highly amicable interview</a> with Sean Hannity).<br /><br />The second issue typically used to argue that Giuliani cannot attract the necessary support from the party's Christian conservative faction is the wreck of a personal life he has suffered -- the two broken marriages, the publicly documented adultery, his cohabitation with a gay couple, etc. But there are few things that are clearer than the fact that Christian conservatives care far less about a person's actual conduct and behavior (and specifically whether it comports to claimed Christian morality standards) than they do about the person's moral and political rhetoric, and even more so, a person's ability to secure political power.<br /><br />Two of the most admired political figures among Christian conservatives -- Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich -- have the most shameful, tawdry, and degenerate personal lives (using the claimed standards of that political faction). Yet the gross disparity between their personal conduct and the religious and moral values they espouse has not injured their standing in the slightest among the "values voters." <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/kob/kob200405140841.asp">Here</a>, to take but one of countless examples, is how Kate O'Beirne speaks of Rush Limbaugh:<br /><blockquote><br />Rush's angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the "facts."<span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold"> We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, </span>and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her.</blockquote><br />Rush Limbaugh has been married and "engaged" more times than one can count, has had a series of tawdry unmarried affairs and break-ups, developed a pleasure-providing and illegal drug habit, and has been caught with fistfuls of unprescribed Viagra while returning from a weekend jaunt to the Dominican Republic. But the pious and moral O'Beirne, speaking on behalf of Christian conservatives, says that they "trust his good judgment" and his "unerring decency."<br /><br />The measuring stick for someone's "morality" among the bulk of Christian conservatives -- and certainly for their political leaders -- is the rhetoric someone spews, not whether their actions or personal conduct comport with the moral sermons. Supporting Giuliani would hardly be the first time Christian conservatives chose as their standard-bearer someone whose actual personal behavior deviates as fundamentally as can be from the moral standards which Christian conservatives claim to embrace. If anything, that discrepancy between their leaders' sermons and their leaders' behavior seems par for the course (the incident most likely to harm Giuliani in any meaningful way is when he <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/feastoffools/75055550/">dressed in drag</a>, as highly alienating an act as possible for a political movement that venerates, above all else, those who <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/images/20020809-1_ranch4-765v.html">play act</a> pure <a href="http://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blyreagan7.htm">masculinity</a> and <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/05/images/20030501-15_d050103-2-664v.html">substance-less poses of physical courage</a>).<br /><br />Rudy Giuliani is, I think, by the far the smartest and most politically talented candidate in the Republican field, a fact to which most residents of New York during his mayoralty - including those who dislike him -- would likely attest. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, he won two elections, including a landslide for his second term. And he does have in his past many incidents which will uniquely appeal to Christian conservatives, such as the <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/oct1999/muse-o05.shtml">war he waged</a> periodically on works of art and other cultural expressions which offended his religious sensibilities.<br /><br />As this excellent and comprehensive <a href="http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/12/05/giuliani/index.html">article</a> documents, Giuliani is an "authoritarian narcissist" -- plagued by an unrestrained prosecutor's mentality -- who loves coercive government power (especially when vested in his hands) and hates dissent above all else. He would make George Bush look like an ardent lover of constitutional liberties. He is probably the absolute worst and most dangerous successor to George Bush under the circumstances, but his political talents and prospects for winning are being severely underestimated.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE</u></b>: To clarify a couple of points arising out of the discussion in Comments: there are, of course, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">some </span>Christian Republican voters who will not vote for Giuliani exclusively because of his position on social issues. But the influence of those type of voters -- single-minded social issues voters -- is often overstated. There is a reason he is leading in most Republican public opinion polls.<br /><br />A significant part of the Republican "base" cares more, perhaps far more, about hawkish Middle East policies than about gay marriage and abortion. They are still looking for their Churchillian hero, and Giuliani's crime-busting, 9/11-hero-posturing, prosecutorial toughness (staring down mafia leaders, terrorists and Wall St. criminals) makes him the most credible authoritarian Leader figure in the field. There is often a view of the "evangelical Republican" voter that is more monolithic than is warranted; they crave "strong" authoritarian leaders as much as they crave anything else.<br /><br />More significantly, who is the candidate whom the hard-core, single-issue Religious Right voters are going to support? They dislike McCain intensely, and Romney's social conservative credentials are now very much in doubt. The appeal of George Bush as a candidate was that he had both establishment/front-runner credibility and evangelical appeal. That role was supposed to be filled by George Allen, but with his disappearance, there is no such candidate. For the hard-core religious voter, Sam Brownback or Mike Huckabee will be more appealing than Rudy Giuliani, but it is very hard to envision either of them winning, which illustrates the main point: Giuliani's stance on social issues will lose him some votes, but it is far, far from certain that it will preclude his winning the nomination.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE II</u></b>: Evangelical Bush-lover Hugh Hewitt -- who resides at the intersection of all of the most extremist factions comprising the GOP "base" -- has this <a href="http://hughhewitt.townhall.com/g/31b3384c-8667-40c3-968f-2c015058226b">to say</a> today:<br /><blockquote><br />Mayor Giuliani and Governor Romney are eager to appear on media preferred by the center-right. Senator McCain sticks primarily to Beltway elite shows . . . <span style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold">Mayor Giuliani had a great appearance on Hannity & Colmes last night</span> . . .The Governor and the Mayor seems disposed to engage the grassroots that way. </blockquote><br />Powerline's John Hinderaker -- as GOP base-like as it gets -- <a href="http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016706.php">featured</a> a You Tube video of Giuliani's appearance with Hannity and said: "It was a good reminder of how able a politician and leader Giuliani is, and also of the areas where his record diverges from the party's base. Giuliani approaches the social issues like abortion in what I think is the most effective way; he doesn't back off from his moderate-to-liberal policy views, but says that as President, he would appoint strict constructionist judges."<br /><br />Given that the bulk of Hannity's questions were about Giuliani's positions on social issues, these favorable reactions from highly representative GOP dead-ender types is, I think, significant and a sign that fewer people in the GOP base will write Giuliani off than is typically assumed.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE III</u></b>: Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog <a href="http://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2007/02/ok-im-not-biggest-hillary-clinton-fan.html">examines</a> the transparent rehabilitative propaganda campaign surrounding Giluiani's personal life which was unleashed today via a coordinated effort between the Giuliani campaign and <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">The New York Post</span> (which, incidentally, also included a <a href="http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/print.php?url=http://www.nypost.com/seven/02062007/postopinion/opedcolumnists/rudys_right_stuff_opedcolumnists_john_podhoretz.htm">gushing column</a> from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bush-Country-Century-While-Driving-Liberals/dp/0312324731/sr=8-2/qid=1170812724/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/105-9209151-5980433?ie=UTF8&s=books">supreme Bush-lover</a> John Podhoretz, in which he insists that conservatives love Giuliani and that he should be considered the front-runner to win the nomination).http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/rudy-giulianis-compatibility-with.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117076692819485277Tue, 06 Feb 2007 11:48:00 +00002007-02-06T11:12:59.920-02:00Angry, uncivil liberal bloggers<span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.nationalreview.com">The National Review</a> </span>today promotes Byron York's article on Valerie Plame:<br /><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/1600/396661/nationalreview.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/320/587809/nationalreview.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>The sheer hatred directed at Valerie Plame by Bush followers has always been intense, extreme, and deeply personal -- even when assessed within the context of their standard operating procedure of despising any government employee, civil servant, and especially any military or intelligence professional who is perceived to have done something politically harmful to the Leader (the textbook case for that were the <a href="http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/1083.html">immediate threats</a> of criminal prosecution directed at former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill after he criticized the Leader upon resigning his position). But for reasons best left to the field of psychology rather than political science, many of them harbor a special, particularly deranged and particularly irrational hatred for Valerie Plame.<br /><br />In that regard, the decision by <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span> to label Plame on its front page as "The C Word" -- please let us dispense with the <a href="http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=c-word">pretext</a> that they only meant "covert" -- may not be surprising, but it ought to be worth at least a six month moratorium on all of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401648.html">pious protests</a> over how angry, profane and uncivil "the Left" and "liberal bloggers" are. As York himself fretted in his book, <a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780307237774"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Vast LeftWing Conspiracy</span></a>: "The Left is angry—angry at President George W. Bush, the war in Iraq, the 'right-wing media,' and more."<br /><br />Somewhere along the way it was decided that the most egregious act of "incivility" is not spewing vile ideas or violence-inciting rhetoric, but instead, the absolute worst injury to our body politic, the most disturbing sign of "anger," is the use of naughty words. From <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span>'s Stanely Kurtz, <a href="http://books.nationalreview.com/review/?q=NDdmY2FlYjZkOTg3YjQ5Njg2YTQ2MzViZDkzYzdiODg=">reviewing</a> Peter Wood's new book on anger in politics:<br /><br /><blockquote>New Anger is nowhere more at home than in the blogosphere, where so far from being held in check, look-at-me performance anger is the path to quick success. Wood’s section on the “proud maliciousness” of bloggers (titled “Insta-Anger”) will stir debate, yet it’s far from a blanket indictment. The Insta-Pundit himself is off the hook, for example. “[Glenn] Reynolds’ comments are often sardonic but seldom angry,” says Wood. On the other hand, Atrios explaining “Why We Say ‘F***’ a Lot” (expurgation most definitely not in the original) fares far less well at Wood’s hands.</blockquote><br />Glenn Reynolds spews <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/06/compare-and-contrast-2/">bigotry</a> and <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives/032617.php">paranoid</a> rantings as overt as can be imagined, continuously <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/01/post_2144.php">smears</a> the <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives/028991.php">media</a> and <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives/029219.php">political opponents</a> as traitors, <a href="http://www.instapundit.com/archives/033747.php">calls for</a> one war after the next, disseminates the most <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/posts/2006/07/29/the-anti-war-majority-glenn-reynolds-and-the-dishonest-tactics-of-the-pro-war-right/">baseless</a> and <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/009237.php">false</a> innuendo virtually on a <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/19/13618/8190">daily basis</a>, but there is nothing "angry" or "uncivil" about any of that because he refrains from using naughty words.<br /><br />Indecent accusations and wretched ideology decorated with civil-sounding words are acceptable. But substantive ideas and protests against government action which periodically include a naughty word is an unparalleled bane on civilization that no decent person can accept. Using those (shallow though almost universally accepted) standards, what does <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span>'s application of "the C Word" to Valerie Plame reveal about its place in our political discourse?http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/angry-uncivil-liberal-bloggers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117071013553193117Mon, 05 Feb 2007 20:53:00 +00002007-02-05T20:53:58.916-02:00Profile of the Neoconservative WarriorMark Steyn is one of the most <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/11/our-wise-national-security-guardians.html">extremist</a> <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/mark-steyn-and-hugh-hewitt-reveal-true.html">warmongers</a> in our country and is <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/will-real-cowards-please-stand-up.html">gripped by the fear</a> that the European race will die out as Muslims breed too rapidly and take over. He has also been as <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/so-wrong-that-it-re-defines-wrongness.html">fundamentally wrong</a> as one can be about virtually every issue he has touched. Guess who considers him a foreign policy guru? From a <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker </span><a href="http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/070212fa_fact_goldberg?page=1">profile</a> of the Independent Senator from Connecticut, by Jeffery Goldberg:<br /><blockquote><br />Lieberman says that he does, at times, feel isolated. . . .<br /><br />In another conversation, he told me that he was reading “America Alone,” a book by the conservative commentator Mark Steyn, which argues that Europe is succumbing, demographically and culturally, to an onslaught by Islam, leaving America friendless in its confrontation with Islamic extremism.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">“The thing I quote most from it is the power of demographics, in Europe particularly,” Lieberman said. </span>“That’s what struck me the most. But the other part is a kind of confirmation of what I know and what I’ve read elsewhere, which is that Islamist extremism has an ideology, and it’s expansionist, it’s an aggressive ideology. And the title I took to mean that we Americans will have ultimate responsibility for stopping this expansionism.”</blockquote><br />Goldberg also includes this seemingly insignificant but quite revealing incident from Lieberman's past:<br /><blockquote><br />Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”</blockquote><br />That is about as vivid a profile of the neoconservative warrior mentality as one can get: paranoid and frightened guys who derive personal and emotional fulfillment by giddily cheering on military destruction from a safe and comfortable distance -- who see war as a fun video game to play, through which one can feel the pulsating sensations of power and triumph -- combined with an obsessive focus on, really a paranoia of, the threat of Islamic fantacism to the seeming exclusion of every other issue and danger.<br /><br />Combine those two traits and one not only finds the principal sentiment that drove us into Iraq and will keep us there for the foreseeable future, but also the primary reason why a majority of Americans <a href="http://www.rasmussenreports.com/2007/February/Iran.htm">now believe</a> that the U.S. will soon be at war with Iran. Lieberman also smears unnamed colleagues who are opposed to the "surge" by claiming: “<span style="font-weight: bold;">A lot of Democrats are</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">essentially pacifists</span> and somewhat isolationist," even though there is <a href="http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=107&session=1&amp;vote=00281">not a single Democrat</a>, at least not in the Senate, who could be accurately described that way. Lieberman now even wields the lowest smear tactics used by people like Mark Steyn.<br /><br />Joe Lieberman believes, accurately, that he can openly praise Mark Steyn's foreign policy "theories" (embraced just as enthusiastically by the <a href="http://www.rightwingnews.com/blogsel/concol2005.php">right-wing blogosphere</a> and <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/spine?pid=52882">Marty Peretz</a>) because -- while everyone to the left of <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic </span>is deemed to be a fringe, untouchable radical -- there is <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060201-7.html">no such thing</a> as a right-wing pundit too extreme or pernicious to be declared out of the mainstream.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/profile-of-neoconservative-warrior.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117068121025226481Mon, 05 Feb 2007 13:12:00 +00002007-02-05T14:36:20.483-02:00How the super-smart, insider experts opine<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />The New Republic</span> has published <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070205&s=wittes020507">an article</a> by Benjamin Wittes, a "Guest Scholar" at the Brookings Institution, which argues that the issues surrounding the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping activities are so complex and sophisticated, and raise such grave matters of national security, that not even the most brilliant and well-informed insider-experts -- such as Wittes -- could possibly form an opinion about whether the Bush administration did anything wrong. Only blind, ignorant partisans would claim that President Bush acted wrongfully or illegally here.<br /><br />Wittes' article is the perfect textbook illustration of how the above-it-all, very-serious, super-smart, self-anointed pundit-experts churn out empty, cliched decrees -- which, though totally devoid of substance, nonetheless enable the Bush movement's worst excesses. Wittes executes this formula perfectly. First comes the Broder-ish tactic of equating and then dismissing both "extremes" in the debate in order to establish one's nonpartisan, elevated, detached objectivity:<br /></span><blockquote><br />Many liberals are convinced that the program represented a deep affront to the rule of law, though they don't know quite what the program was. Many conservatives are no less certain of the program's absolute necessity. And, though they don't know quite what it was either, they are sure as well that President Bush had the authority to implement it--whatever federal law on the subject may happen to say.</span></span></blockquote><br />Right at the start we learn how very clever and objective Wittes is: both "liberals" and "conservatives" have formed strong opinions about the NSA scandal despite knowing nothing. Thus, those who object to the President's law-breaking are exactly the same as those who defend it: merely loud-mouth partisan extremists -- opposite sides of the same shrill, lowly coin -- who can be scornfully dismissed away as know-nothing hysterics. Such blind ignorance, of course, stands in stark contrast to the very high-minded and insider expertise of Wittes:<br /></span></span></span><blockquote><br />Unlike many of these oh-so-confident commentators, <span style="font-weight: bold;">I actually know something</span> about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> I am one of the very few journalists--to my knowledge, in fact, the only one</span>--who ever physically set foot inside the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court. FISA has been a particular interest of mine since the mid-'90s, when I was a young reporter at a legal trade paper and the court it created was the most obscure corner of the federal judiciary. Precisely because nobody knew anything about it, <span style="font-weight: bold;">I studied it obsessively</span>. <span style="font-weight: bold;">I talked to the judges </span>who heard the government's surveillance requests and to the Justice Department lawyers who advanced these applications. I learned, in some detail, the contours, value, and the limitations of FISA at a time when very few people cared about it.<br /><br />So what is my assessment of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, informed by my decade of watching the court and the law that underlies it?<br /><br />I don't know.</span></span></span></span></blockquote><br />Just preliminarily, do <i>The New Republic </i>editors really not realize how adolescent this all sounds? "<span class="articlecontent">I actually know something about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act." "I am one of the very few journalists--to my knowledge, in fact, the only one--who ever physically set foot inside the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court." "I studied it obsessively." "I learned, in some detail, the contours, value, and the limitations of FISA at a time when very few people cared about it." To <i>The New Republic</i>, this sounds impressive, because they think it constitutes a persuasive (even necessary) foundation for someone to begin an argument by insisting, based on nothing, how much more knowledgable they are than everyone else.<br /><br />In fact, Wittes' insider credentials are so impressive that he can simply decree the truth about issues without even bothering to offer any rationale or facts at all. His entire article is devoid of any facts or arguments. He simply assures us that <span style="font-style: italic;">he knows so much more about FISA </span>than you do, and because of how much he knows, he realizes that these matters are way too complicated <span style="font-style: italic;">even for him </span>-- let alone for <span style="font-style: italic;">you </span>-- to form an opinion about whether the President did anything wrong here. This is his whole "argument":<br /><blockquote><br />I don't know what the program is. I don't know whether it was lawful before the recent change. Truth be told, I don't even understand what the change announced in Gonzales's letter really means. I can arrange the facts in the public record so as to describe a program that would, in my view, offend the Constitution. And I can arrange the facts in the public record so as to describe a program that would not, in my view, offend the Constitution. I can imagine a program outside of FISA that the law should be amended to accommodate. And I can imagine a program that violates the FISA precisely because it involves the kind of warrantless surveillance the law was passed to prevent. What's more, the more I learn about this program, the less I understand it.</blockquote><br />For the eager-to-please, self-styled Beltway insider-experts, a failure to form a clear political opinion is the mark of both intellectual and moral superiority, of emotional maturity, and is the hallmark of that most coveted Washington virtue -- <span style="font-style: italic;">seriousness</span>. Unlike <span style="font-style: italic;">you</span>, who has formed one of those dirty opinions that the President has no right to break the law, Wittes understand that these matters are much, much more complex and sophisticated than that -- after all, this involves computers and national security threats and data and things you cannot possibly begin to understand -- and it is only your ignorance, your extremely unserious partisanship, that has enabled you to think that you are in a position to oppose or condemn what George Bush has done here (<span style="font-style: italic;">TNR</span>'s Jason Zengerle long ago <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=4807">pronounced</a> </span>that "some of the outrage [over the NSA scandal] is in fact outrageous").<br /><br />Like most of these pundits, Beltway journalists, and think-tank "fellows," Wittes <span style="font-style: italic;">wants</span> the President's lawbreaking to implicate all sorts of murky and complex matters because, that way, the expertise which Wittes thinks he has would be needed. It would mean that only Wittes, but not you, is qualified to form judgments and that your obligation would be to listen to him and rely on what he says, rather than form your own views. So he asserts that there are all kinds of complicated issues (never identified) which only insiders can understand and which prevent any meaningful opinions to be formed by non-insiders (i.e., the masses).<br /><br />As is so often true with articles like this one in <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic, </span>and similar venues, Wittes' eager attempt to show how much more than everyone else he knows ends up revealing the precise opposite -- a profound ignorance regarding the issues about which he is purporting to enlighten us all. The FISA law, as intended, is one of the clearest laws in the U.S. Code, and the issues raised by the NSA scandal are everything <span style="font-style: italic;">but </span>complicated or murky.<br /><br />I think everyone other than Wittes and a handful of still-confused Bush followers understands now that the U.S. Code <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00002511----000-.html">provides</a> that "the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the <span style="font-weight: bold;">exclusive means</span> by which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted", and FISA itself <a href="http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001809----000-.html">provides</a> that "A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally <span class="enumbell">(1)</span> <span class="ptext-2">engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute."<br /><br />The administration <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-1.html">admits</a> </span>that the eavesdropping it has been conducting outside of the FISA court -- <span style="font-style: italic;">whatever</span> that might entail -- is precisely the type of eavesdropping for which the FISA law requires a court order. And the fact that the administration has now agreed to conduct <span style="font-style: italic;">this same eavesdropping </span>under the purview of the FISA court by itself proves that this eavesdropping is the type covered by FISA (otherwise, the FISA judges would have no jurisdiction to supervise it). For that reason, Wittes' grand conclusion is completely bereft of logic and just factually wrong on every level:<br /><blockquote><br />For whatever it's worth, here's my best guess--and, I stress, it's only a guess--about what this NSA program was all about: I suspect it was an <span style="font-weight: bold;">earnest attempt</span> to address problems that the drafters of the FISA would have been mortified to learn they had created for the intelligence community. . . .<br /><br />This hypothesis could be totally wrong. The point is that, <span style="font-weight: bold;">without knowing the precise contours of the program, it is simply impossible to evaluate it against a complicated and subtle law written at a time when the computer age was still in its infancy. </span>Some day, we will finally learn what the program really was and why it couldn't, and then could, be approved through the FISA Court. Details will leak, or the technology will become too obsolete to warrant continued protection. When that day comes, those who insist that no possible combination of technology, law, and national emergency could excuse bypassing the court may find themselves embarrassed. . . .</blockquote><br />What facts could possibly emerge that make us all realize how Good and Right the President was to break the law, or for us to conclude that he didn't? Wittes doesn't bother to identify such possible facts, because none exist. By definition, none can exist.<br /><br />FISA -- at least the parts relevant to the administration's lawbreaking -- is <span style="font-style: italic;">not </span>a "complicated and subtle law" except to people who do not understand it or who want purposely to obscure it. And one does not need to know "precise contours of the program" in order to know that the President broke the law. That he engaged in the precise eavesdropping without warrants for which FISA <span style="font-style: italic;">requires </span>warrants renders all of Wittes' very, very complicated and angst-ridden speculation completely irrelevant.<br /><br />But this is how this sort of pompous, self-styled partisan-transcendence almost always operates. They think that things like emphatic beliefs and principles -- and especially stern criticism of our Serious National Security Leaders -- are for the lowly, anti-intellectual masses.<span class="articlecontent"> The true guardians of wisdom and serious political thought in our society <span style="font-style: italic;">struggle </span>endlessly with complex intellectual dilemmas and never reach any definitive conclusions because they are <span style="font-style: italic;">too smart </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">too serious </span>for things like convictions or beliefs or things as shrill and irresponsible as accusations of wrongdoing against a sitting wartime President </span></span><span class="articlecontent"><span class="ptext-2">(the classic case illustrating this mindset was when<span style="font-style: italic;"> The New Republic</span>'s Jonathan Chait <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=32178">chided</a> those whom he revealingly labelled as "partisan hysterics" -- meaning those who objected to his magazine's <span style="font-style: italic;">defense of Ann Coulter</span> and thus, unlike the complex and thoughtful Chait, failed to appreciate what a "clever, interesting, very well-executed" intellectual achievement it was).<br /><br />The impact of this petty, self-regarding mentality is hard to overstate. In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, it manifested as endless condemnation against war opponents on the ground that war opponents were simply too shrill and emphatic and failed to grapple with all of the fascinating, multi-layered, theoretical challenges which any serious, complex political thinker had to confront when pondering Iraq.<br /><br />And the same thing is occurring now with Iran. Only "partisan hysterics" would take the position that a military attack on Iran is unwarranted, unnecessary, and insane. More sophisticated, trans-partisan, serious thinkers understand that the issue is <span style="font-style: italic;">far more complex</span> than that and cannot be reduced to such crass partisan certainties.<br /><br />This really illustrates the core of why our pundit class and Beltway opinion-making mechanisms are so corrupt and worthless, but also so destructive. The whole point -- the only objective -- of Wittes' article, and of columns and articles from most of our establishment pundits, is to establish their own special place of wisdom and insight. To achieve that, they reduce all political matters to nothing more than grand intellectual puzzles, and equate any real <span style="font-style: italic;">beliefs </span>with primitive ignorance. That is what they mean by heinous, lowly "partisanship" -- genuine political convictions.<br /><br />There is no place for hard-core beliefs or passion and <span style="font-style: italic;">especially </span>not for anger. Such emotions are just the misguided stirrings of the masses. And thus, a President and his political movement start disastrous wars, are provoking still new ones, systematically and deliberately break the law, destroy U.S. credibility, and introduce a whole array of radical and destructive measures. But those are all just fascinating intellectual matters which we should ponder with delicacy and civility and mild, restrained discourse. None of them warrants any strong reactions or condemnations.<br /><br />And so the super-smart, insider pundit class merrily buzzes along, never forming a definitive thought or opinion about anything other than to haughtily condemn those who object to what the President and his political movement have done and plan to do. Regarding the destruction which this President is wreaking on the country, Wittes summarizes how the truly smart, sober, non-partisan experts (as opposed to the partisan hysterics) should react: "'I don't know' seems like a good place to me."<br /><br /><u><b>UPDATE</b></u>: <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span>'s Dan Froomkin has published a <a href="http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&amp;backgroundid=00156">superb list</a> of basic journalistic rules which ought not be controversial but which are nonetheless routinely violated by our nation's press corps (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117068121025226481/#89942">Jay Ackroyd</a> and <a href="http://www.firedoglake.com">Christy</a>). Just fathom how much more effective and meaningful our media would be if they complied with these minimal guidelines.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-super-smart-insider-experts-opine.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117050429073495997Sat, 03 Feb 2007 11:54:00 +00002007-02-03T15:12:22.453-02:00Enforced orthodoxies and Iran<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />On Thursday, the neoconservative <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Sun </span>published <a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/47843">a remarkable article</a> reporting on an event to be held that night by AIPAC, at which Hillary Clinton was to deliver the keynote address and John Edwards was to appear at the pre-speech cocktail party. The article made several points which are typically deemed off-limits to opponents of neoconservatism -- ones which almost invariably provoke accusations of anti-semitism when made by others.<br /><br />First, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun</span> noted how important AIPAC's support and financial contributions are to presidential candidates:<br /><blockquote><br />"When it comes to important gatherings like this, there is going to be a lot of pressure on the major candidates to not let one of their competitors have the room to themselves," a Democratic strategist [and former Joe Lieberman aide], Daniel Gerstein, said.<br /><br />Tonight's event is the first time any of the 2008 candidates have competed for attention in the same room since they launched their campaigns in earnest. It is also an important illustration of just <span style="font-weight: bold;">how much stock all of the presidential candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, will put in the pro- Israel community, particularly for campaign dollars.</span></blockquote><br />Then, the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun </span>emphasized how vital it was for presidential candidates to attract contributions from New York Jewish groups generally, and how such contributions (as is true for all interest groups) are available only to those candidates who support those groups' so-called "pro-Israel" agenda:<br /><blockquote><br />A Democratic political consultant who worked on President Clinton 's re-election campaign, Hank Sheinkopf, noted that the Aipac dinner always draws a parade of politicians.<br /><br /><b>New York is the ATM for American politicians. Large amounts of money come from the Jewish community,"</b> he said. "If you're running for president and you want dollars from that group, you need to show that you're interested in the<span style="font-weight: bold;"> issue that matters most</span> to them."</blockquote><br />And, according to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun,</span> what do presidential candidates have to do in order to ensure access to "the ATM for American politicians" -- the "large amounts of money from the Jewish community" in New York? What is the "issue that matters most to them"? Belligerence towards Iran:<br /><blockquote><br />Indeed, how to deal with Iran is likely to be the next majority foreign policy conundrum the 2008 presidential candidates face.<br /><br />While Mr. Edwards and Mrs. Clinton have different positions on how to deal with the Iraq war, each has used harsh language on Iran.</blockquote><br />The <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun </span>also highlighted how vital (what it calls) "the circuit of influential Jewish donors" is to Hillary Clinton specifically:<br /><blockquote><br />Mrs. Clinton, who has opted out of the public campaign financing system<span style="font-weight: bold;">, has tapped into the circuit of influential Jewish donors for years</span> and has strong support in the community. A spokesman for Aipac, Joshua Block, said yesterday that the senator and former first lady has "an extremely consistent and strong record of support on issues that are important to <span style="font-weight: bold;">the pro- Israel community</span>."<br /><br />"She is an extraordinary leader on those issues in the United States Senate," he said.</blockquote><br />So, according to <span style="font-style: italic;">The</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Sun</span> (and the sources it cites): (1) financial support from groups like AIPAC is indispensable for presidential candidates; (2) the New York Jewish community of "influential" donors is a key part of the "ATM for American politicians"; (3) the issue which they care about most is Iran; and (4) they want a hawkish, hard-line position taken against Iran. And the presidential candidates -- such as Clinton and Edwards -- are embracing AIPAC's anti-Iran position in order to curry favor with that group.<br /><br />If any public figure made those same points, they would be excoriated, accused of all sorts of heinous crimes, and forced into repentance rituals (<a href="http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2007/1/21/164224.shtml">ask</a> <a href="http://gopforwkc.blogspot.com/2007/01/adl-accepts-clark-explaination.html">Wes Clark</a>). But this is what the <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Sun</span> reported on Thursday.<br /><br />As expected, Sen. Clinton matched Edwards' hard-line anti-Iran rhetoric by <a href="http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/02/02/america/NA-GEN-US-Clinton-Iran.php">including</a> all sorts of hawkish threats in her AIPAC speech:<br /><blockquote><br />Calling Iran a danger to the U.S. and one of Israel's greatest threats, U.S. senator and presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said "no option can be taken off the table" when dealing with that nation. . . . "We need to use every tool at our disposal, including diplomatic and economic in addition to the threat and use of military force," she said.</blockquote><br />But <a href="http://www.nypost.com/seven/02022007/news/nationalnews/israel_fans_groan_over_hill_speech_nationalnews_maggie_haberman.htm">according to</a> the equally neoconservative <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Post</span>, Clinton's speech was poorly received by many of the AIPAC members, because she committed the crime of suggesting that diplomacy (presumably as opposed to war) ought to be attempted first in order to resolve these issues with Iran:<br /><blockquote><br />Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton drew grumbles at a pro-Israel dinner in Times Square last night when she encouraged "engaging" with Iran before taking stronger action to keep it nuke-free. . . .<br /><br />Clinton's remarks at the Marriott Marquis were met with little applause, and after she left the stage, several people said they were put off by the presidential candidate. <b>"This is the wrong crowd to do that with," said one person at the dinner, noting the pro-Israel crowd wanted to hear tougher rhetoric.</b></blockquote><br />Is there anything that Wes Clark said that is not included in these articles from the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun </span>and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Post</span>? No, there is not. In fact, what Clark said is but a small subset of what these articles documented.<br /><br />It is simply true that there are large and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel's interests and they perceive it to be in Israel's interests for the U.S. to militarily confront Iran. That is what the <span style="font-style: italic;">Sun </span>and the <span style="font-style: italic;">Post </span>have made clear.<br /><br />There is just no point in denying that or pretending it is not the case, and in any event, the way in which these groups have ratcheted up their explicit anti-Iran advocacy has made it impossible for these facts to be concealed any longer (and, as I have <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2006/08/08/anti_semitism/index.html">noted before</a>, neoconservatives have been <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/480izkdv.asp">increasingly arguing</a> that American Jews of all political stripes are <a href="http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014773.php#014773">compelled</a> to support the Bush administration because of its supposedly "pro-Israel" policies -- a claim grounded in the very "dual loyalty" theories which they claim to find so offensive and outrageous when advanced by others).<br /><br />It goes without saying that there are other factions and motives behind the push for war with Iran besides right-wing Jewish groups. There is the generic warmongering, militarism and oil-driven expansionism represented by Dick Cheney. And there are the post-9/11 hysterics and bigots who crave ever-expanding warfare and slaughter of Muslims in the Middle East for reasons having nothing to do with Israel. There are evangelical Christians who crave more Middle Eastern war on religious and theological grounds, and there are some who just believe that the U.S. can and should wage war against whatever countries seem not like to us. And, it should also be noted, a huge portion of American Jews, if not the majority, do not share this agenda.<br /><br />Nonetheless, the influence of self-proclaimed "pro-Israeli" American Jewish groups in helping to push the country into what looks more and more every day to be an inevitable conflict with Iran is very significant and cannot be ignored. Along those lines, I want to return to the David Brooks <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/opinion/01brooks.html?hp">column</a> which I <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/david-brooks-national-spokesman-for.html">wrote about</a> on Thursday -- a column I criticized on the ground that Brooks falsely asserted, in essence, that "Americans" want continued U.S. military domination of the Middle East, and that the disaster of Iraq hasn't changed their views on that topic, even though polling data show precisely the opposite.<br /><br />Despite all of that, Brooks did make a point which is both true and important -- namely, that among all of the leading presidential candidates, and within the dominant American political discourse, the only view that is really represented is the view that America should continue to militarily dominate the Middle East:<br /><blockquote><br />Americans are having a debate about how to proceed in Iraq, <span style="font-weight: bold;">but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence.</span> What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world.<br /><br />Look at the leaders emerging amid this crisis. The two major Republican presidential contenders are John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, the most aggressive internationalists in a party that used to have an isolationist wing.<br /><br />The Democrats, meanwhile, campaigned for Congress in 2006 by promising to increase the size of the military. The presidential front-runner, Hillary Clinton, is the leader of the party’s hawkish wing and recently called for a surge of U.S. troops into Afghanistan. John Edwards, the most “leftward” major presidential contender, just delivered a bare-knuckled speech in which he castigated the Bush administration for not being tough enough with Iran. “To ensure that Iran never gets nuclear weapons, we need to keep all options on the table,” Edwards warned.</blockquote><br />Even though Americans <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_080606.htm">do not support</a> military intervention in the Middle East on behalf of Israel, and <a href="http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=126">fewer and fewer</a> support military adventurism in the Middle East generally, Brooks is right about the fact that all of the leading presidential candidates embrace the militaristic Middle East agenda shared by AIPAC and similar groups. Who are the candidates who reject it? Any who would are immediately marginalized and would be subjected to the Wes Clark treatment (<u>i.e.</u>, demonized as an anti-semite unless and until they repented, appeared before Abe Foxman to request absolution, repudiated their views, and then took an oath of allegiance to that agenda). And they would be cut off from what Hank Sheinkopf called the "ATM for American politicians."<br /><br />Thus, no leading presidential candidate seems able to articulate clear opposition to the militaristic, war-seeking posture we are <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002472.php">obviously taking</a> with regard to Iran. Instead, they are all spouting rhetoric which -- as Digby <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_digbysblog_archive.html#117046464485756663">pointed out</a> last night -- amounts to an endorsement, or at least a re-inforcement, of the Bush Doctrine: namely, that preemptive war is permissible in general and may be specifically necessarily against Iran. Regardless of whether there is merit in the abstract to the notion of "keeping all options on the table," this sort of talk now has the effect, as Digby argues, of enabling Bush's increasingly war-provoking moves towards Iran.<br /><br />There is a real, and quite disturbing, discrepancy between the range of permissible views on these issues within our mainstream political discourse and the views of a large segment of the American public. The former almost completely excludes the latter.<br /><br />That has to change and quickly. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, we did not have a real debate in this country about whether that was wise or just. Cartoon images and bullying tactics supplanted rational discourse -- not only prior to the invasion but for several years after -- and we are paying the very heavy price for that now. That is simply not a luxury that the country can afford this time. It is genuinely difficult to imagine anything more cataclysmic for the United States than a military confrontation with Iran.<br /><br />If part of our motivation in confronting Iran is that Iran is a threat to Israel, then we should declare that openly and debate whether that is wise. That topic cannot be rendered off-limits by toxic and manipulative anti-semitism accusations. All the time, Americans openly debate the influence which all sorts of interest groups have on government policy. There is nothing, in substance, different about this topic.<br /><br />Just as is true for Iraq, we have been subjected to a carousel of ever-changing, unrelated "justifications" as to why Iran is our mortal enemy against whom war is necessary. First was the alarm-ringing over Iran's alleged pursuit of nuclear weapons. Then, the President <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/president-has-made-his-choice-more.html">began</a> featuring the (<a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/is-iran-most-active-state-sponsor-of.html">highly misleading</a>) claim that Iran is the "leading sponsor of international terrorism." That was followed by an unrelenting emphasis on the ugly statements from Iran's President (but <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.irna.ir/en/news/view/line-24/0701284208194633.htm">not</a> </span><a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1974951,00.html">its</a> "<a href="http://apnews.myway.com/article/20070202/D8N18AL80.html">leader</a>"), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the emphasis has shifted to Iran's alleged (but entirely <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran3feb03,0,2695314.story?coll=la-home-headlines">unproven and apparently overstated</a>) fueling of the civil war in Iraq.<br /><br />The only clear fact that emerges from this morass of war-fueling claims is that there are significant and influential factions within the country which want to drive the U.S. to wage war against Iran and change its government. What matters to them is that this goal is achieved. The "justifications" which enable it do not seem to matter at all. Whatever does the trick will be used. Candid and explicit debates over these issues -- and clear, emphatic opposition to the course the President is clearly pursuing with regard to Iran -- is urgently necessary.<br /><br />If all we have are the type of delicate, fear-driven, partial "debates" which we had over Iraq and the muddled, ambivalent, politically fearful positions from our political leaders that preceded the Iraq invasion, then we will have the same result with Iran as we had with Iraq. And there just is no more pressing priority than ensuring that does not happen. But, at this point at least, one searches in vain for the political leaders who are committed to stopping it. The Wes Clark humiliation and punishment ritual was intended to deter exactly such opposition, and it seems to be achieving its objective rather well.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE</u></b>: The very same <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Sun</span> today publishes <a href="http://www.nysun.com/article/47946">an article</a> -- headlined <span style="font-style: italic;">Imagining a War with Iran -- </span>that begins with this sentence: "<span id="article" class="article_small">With America heading toward a war with Iran, inadvertent or otherwise, the picture of how the conflict is likely to pan out is becoming clearer." The article then proceeds to describe how the war will play out.<br /><br />On a related note, Powerline's Scott Johnson <a href="http://powerlineblog.com/archives/016671.php">points to</a> an <a href="http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2007/02/02/hilarys-no-liberal-fool-she-just-thinks-we-are/">article</a> from Heather Robinson, who attended the AIPAC event and is angry over Hillary's suggestion that war with Iran may not be necessary: </span>"But while Hillary’s rhetoric of 'engagement' may sound good, the community of anti-terror activists and Israel-supporters must realize that, at the most basic level, engaging with people who wish <span style="font-weight: bold;">your destruction</span>–and are actively working to achieve it–means strengthening a pernicious enemy."<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE II</u></b>: The American Jewish Committee commissioned a poll late last year to ascertain the views of American Jews on various foreign policy matters, and <a href="http://www.forward.com/articles/poll-us-jews-back-strike-against-iran-by-isra/">found</a> (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117050429073495997/#89316">EJ</a>):<br /><blockquote><br />Support among Jews for an American military strike against Iran has declined during the past year, according to an annual survey of American Jewish opinion released Monday.<br /><br />The survey, commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, found that only 38% of American Jews support American military action, down from 49% last year.<br /></blockquote><br />And, of course, 3 out of 4 American Jews <a href="http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=103">voted against</a> George Bush in 2004, notwithstanding the fact that (or because) Bush's Middle East militarism was a predominant issue in the campaign. Despite their influence, Jewish neoconservatives and groups like AIPAC are highly unrepresentative of American Jews as a whole. Those facts only further undescore the baselessness and pure malice driving the attempt to equate opposition to their agenda with "anti-semitism."http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/enforced-orthodoxies-and-iran.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117041861150777768Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:02:00 +00002007-02-02T19:31:25.553-02:00Blogs, alternative political systems, funding<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)<br /><br /></span>There are several topics I was hoping to write about today (and I will), but there is a lingering issue which arose from my <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news.html">announcement yesterday</a> about moving to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> that I think is important and want to address. The vast majority of people who sent e-mails and left comments were very supportive of the move and recognize its benefits and the rationale behind it (and, I am quite certain, the same is true for the much larger group who read this blog but who neither comment nor e-mail).<br /><br />Nonetheless, the complaints and objections -- though anticipated -- were voiced by a slightly larger group than I expected, and they reveal some assumptions and underlying beliefs that are commonplace but, I think, quite harmful. So I will try hard to set aside what I confess up front is some mild personal irritation over the nature of those complaints and instead focus on the more substantive, far-reaching issues which they reflect.<br /><br />The political blogosphere is driven by many factors, but the predominant one, I think, is a pervasive dissatisfaction with the dominant media and political institutions in this country. The blogosphere is essentially a reaction to that dissatisfaction -- an attempt to create an alternative venue where citizens can debate political issues and organize and inform one another without having to rely upon our country's empty media stars and the myopic, corrupt opinion-making insitutions which have wrought so much damage and continue to do so.<br /><br />The principal value of the blogosphere is that it democratizes our political discourse almost completely. Anyone can become a "pundit," find an audience, report facts, create a community of like-minded citizens and activists, and influence the public discourse -- all without having to mold oneself into what is demanded by <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post</span> and without having to care about pleasing the editors of <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span> Magazine.<br /><br />In that regard, the blogosphere enables a very potent freedom. Pre-blogosphere, in order to have one's voice heard, that voice had to conform or be squeezed into the suffocating orthodoxies of the dominant media outlets. That is no longer the case. They are no longer the gatekeepers of the public discourse, and the blogosphere enables people to say what they want, how they want, without caring if that alienates or offends a small group of Beltway media elites.<br /><br />But any competing system that exists outside of the national political and media institutions has to be financially self-sustaining. The sprawling right-wing noise machine has sustained itself, in large part, by constructing what Jane Hamsher (among others) <a href="http://firedoglake.blogspot.com/2006/01/scooter-gets-his-wingnut-welfare.html">calls</a> a vast "welfare" system. A huge portion of the right-wing pundits and <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/05/AR2006010502119.html">influence-peddlers</a> whom you see on television or read in newspapers have extremely <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/aei-iran-and-free-press.html">well-funded organizations</a> behind them that pay them to opine, to disseminate the right-wing gospel, which buy their books in bulk and give them away for free in order to create artificial best-sellers -- all of which enables them to work full-time spreading the right-wing message without being preoccupied with earning a living.<br /><br />There is very little of that outside of that narrow, Bush-loving, (now) neoconservative gutter (a very smart and talented political writer, Ezra Klein, <a href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/01/solidarity.html">noted</a> just the other day what a paucity of opportunity there is in that regard). As a result, other models need to be developed and supported in order for competing networks to exist.<br /><br />One cannot constantly complain -- at least not reasonably or coherently -- that the establishment media is horrible and corrupt and demand that alternative voices be heard more, but then, at the same time, oppose efforts to make alternative media financially sustainable -- on the ground that financial models somehow render the efforts "impure" or "capitalistic" or because it imposes some small inconvenience or denies what you think is your entitlement to be provided with constant fulfillment and satisfaction without having to make the smallest effort or endure the most marginal inconvenience to help sustain it.<br /><br />People who express views outside of the prevailing orthodoxy -- or who do so in a way that does not comport to the demands of two-minute cable segments or the vapid, conventional-wisdom-spewing emptiness of a <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span> Magazine column -- have to find other ways to be able to work on political advocacy and make a living at the same time. In his insightful tribute to Molly Ivins today (h/t <a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_01_28_atrios_archive.html#117039276205486488">Atrios)</a>, Rude Pundit <a href="http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2007/02/goddamnit-molly-ivins.html">notes</a> that Ivins "never became the regular TV pundit that so many other alleged columnists became" because what she argued, and how she argued it, was not what mainstream media outlets wanted.<br /><br />So, in order to read what she wrote, you had to (pre-Amazon) get in your car and go to the bookstore and buy one of her books. Or, post-Amazon, you had to order the book and then wait for it to arrive. She didn't go personally delivering her books for free to everyone's doorstep or placing it in their hands. She couldn't have done that. Those who thought she was a voice worth hearing had to expend the most minimal effort to obtain and buy her books (or find and buy newspapers that carried her columns). That's how she was able to devote her time to her punditry without compromising it and still be able to live and eat and have a place to live. That's just the reality of how the world works.<br /><br />If you're someone who rails against the dominant media institutions in this country (as I do) -- and who hails the critical importance of blogs and other alternative venues as an antidote to the toxic combination of the national media and right-wing noise machine (as I do) -- then it's necessary to recognize that those alternative institutions and the people who work to build them need to support themselves (like everyone else) and to be supported by those who believe in the work they are doing. Everyone wishes that were not the case. But it is.<br /><br />Some time early last year, I was posting at Crooks and Liars when John Amato began running a new form of advertising that was slightly more intrusive than the prior type of ads. The comment section was immediately filled with righteous indignation over how John was "selling out" and outrageously subjecting the loyal C&L readers to the evils of intrusive corporatist advertising (and, in the Comment section to a <a href="http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/02/01/glenn-greenwald-moving-to-saloncom/">C&amp;L post</a> about my move to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> yesterday, one finds the same sentiments).<br /><br />In order to maintain that site, John (like many, many bloggers) works between 12 and 15 hours per day, 7 days a week -- literally -- and has substantial bandwidth expenses to host the large readership and all of the video content. And yet some of the same people who benefit from that site and who believe it contributes valuable content to our political discussions complained bitterly because he found a way to generate some modest income to sustain his work.<br /><br />This mentality is not only petty and self-centered -- though it is that -- but it is also extremely self-defeating. For better or for worse, the reality we live in is such that any individuals or institutions, in order to be effective, need an economic model to fuel it. Effective projects, including political movements and political advocacy, need to be funded.<br /><br />The example of <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>is instructive. There are not very many models for independent online magazines to generate sufficient income to sustain themselves (for many years, <span style="font-style: italic;">Slate </span>had its substantial losses subsidized by its corporate parent, Microsoft, and is now the corporate property of The Washington Post Company). But <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> wanted to remain an outlet for independent journalism and political analysis. And it<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>has repeatedly <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salon.com">faced</a> the prospect of bankruptcy in the past. The one model that they have found that seems to work is the dual-choice of (a) paid subscription or (b) spending 10 seconds (or 30 seconds), once a day, clicking through an ad in order to access all of its content for free.<br /><br />The alternative is <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>'s non-existence. As Juan Cole <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/murderers-gibbet-cole-in-salon.html">said</a>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>publishes articles -- and pays the writers who write them -- which would not be published in very many other places, certainly not ones with the readership of the size <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>reaches. So enduring an ad (or subscribing to avoid the ad) seems a small and necessary price to pay to enable the existence of punditry and reporting outside of the approved orthodoxies of <span style="font-style: italic;">Time </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>doesn't have an ad wall because they are evil, amoral corporatists trying to bombard people's brains with tools of capitalist manipulation. They have an ad wall because that's the only way they can continue to offer the content they offer for free to people without ceasing to exist.<br /><br />And I just want to underscore -- these points are not specific or unique in any way to my move or <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>. Obviously, there are plenty of perfectly valid and legitimate reasons why someone might choose not to continue to read this blog at <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>. There are some bloggers I read regularly whom I would be willing to pay to read, or watch 10 minutes of ads if necessary in order to read. And then there are other bloggers I read somewhat regularly who, if they moved somewhere that I had to pay or watch ads in order to access, perhaps I wouldn't continue to read them. Those are just perfectly legitimate time-allocation choices, and these comments are not at all addressed to people who make choices like that. Nobody is entitled to a readership.<br /><br />But there is a more nefarious sentiment underlying some of these complaints, and it is pervasive and significant. There is a strain of belief, found among some on the left (and again, I think it's a very small minority), which perceives issues like funding and income-generating models as some sort of insult, as something unethical and impure. And then there is another strain which is about unbridled personal entitlement -- the belief that they are entitled to access whatever they want, and have everything they want, without the slightest amount of expenditure or effort on their part (all the effort, expenditure and sacrifice should be from others).<br /><br />I'm sorry that there are people who think that clicking through an ad (or subscribing to avoid it) is a grave insult and an outrageous imposition. It also can be an inconvenience for bloggers (or political analysts or activists of any kind) who -- driven by passion and a desire to contribute in some way to improving the state of the country -- spend 3 hours per day or 8 hours per day or 12 hours per day on their work without being able to earn a living. To begrudge someone the ability to do so -- or to act as though they are engaged in an act of betrayal or even some kind of corruption -- because they find a way to work on behalf of their political ideas and earn a living doing it is truly bizarre.<br /><br />The national corporate-backed media is a huge, sprawling, powerful network. So, too, is the multi-headed right-wing opinion-making monster composed of think tanks, subsidized magazines, and well-fed pundits. To compete with that, to battle against it, requires the building and maintaining of strong systems that are sustainable, which means, at minimum, that they are funded and financially viable.<br /><br />If there are bloggers that you enjoy reading and/or whose writing you think deserves wider circulation, contribute to them or buy ads on their blog or encourage others to do so. If there are magazines or independent journalists which you think are producing valuable reporting, subscribe to them or donate to them or, for those who can't afford that, support them in other non-monetary ways. Encourage political campaigns and organizations to buy ads on blogs rather than in mainstream media outlets. In our society, money and funding are the fuel that enables machines to work potently and effectively. That's just how it is.<br /><br />Denying that, or detatching oneself from that reality, can generate satisfying sensations of purity, but it also renders one ineffective, impotent, and irrelevant. And more to the point, complaining about the "corporate media" or the "right-wing noise machine" while begrudging and impugning efforts to create alternatives seems to be nothing more than self-regarding rhetoric without any meaningful action behind it.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE</u></b>: Ezra Klein <a href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/professionalizi.html">adds</a> some important and interesting insights (and, as always, the terms "liberal" and "progressive" are elastic; they have <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/07/paramountcy-of-neoconservatism-and-joe.html">come to mean</a> "Bush critic" or "opponent of neoconservatism" more than anything else, but that is another topic altogether). And I have a summary of my responses to many of the comments to this post, <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117041861150777768/#89032">here</a>.<br /><br />And I just want to re-iterate that the vast, vast majority of comments and e-mails have been extremely supportive, which I genuinely appreciate. And again: this post is not directed at everyone who expressed concerns or even objections concerning the move, but instead is directed only to those who voiced the specific complaints I am responding to in the post.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blogs-alternative-political-systems.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117035543389388990Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:28:00 +00002007-02-01T23:34:14.990-02:00Blog newsBeginning next Thursday, February 8, this blog will be moving to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>, where it will be a featured <a href="http://www.salon.com">front-page blog</a> (full access to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>is available by subscribing <span style="font-weight: bold;">or </span>for <span style="font-weight: bold;">free</span>, by clicking through an ad to obtain a<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>24 hour day pass). I will also be a <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>Contributing Writer and will write (at least) one feature article per month. I am very excited about this move. It will substantially increase the readership and enhance the visibility for the blog, and I think <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>is the ideal venue for both blogging and for writing. A few observations about the move:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(1)</span> Other than some design changes (actually, design improvements), the content of this blog will remain exactly the same. The first term I negotiated with <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> was complete editorial freedom -- no editorial interventions, no topic "assignments," and no content, length or topic restrictions. I can post when and how frequently I want, and I have access to post 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and posting is immediate. In essence, <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span> wants to publish <span style="font-style: italic;">this</span> blog, not some modified or constrained version, and so I have exactly the same freedom to post there that I have here.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(2)</span> The principal motivation in moving is that the move will immediately result in a substantially increased readership for the blog, along with enhanced visibility generally. As easy as it is to forget, there are still substantial numbers of politically engaged people who do not read blogs, or who read them only periodically.<br /><br />The influence of the blogosphere is growing inexorably, and I think it is still in its incipient stages, but blog readers are still a subset of political readers generally. While the <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>readership overlaps to some extent with the blogosphere, there are large numbers of <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>readers (as is true for most magazines) who don't read blogs, and blogging there will simply enable me to be read by more people.<br /><br />There is also still some lingering (albeit diminishing) bias against people who are "just bloggers." In some eyes -- myopic ones -- writing principally for your own blog is credibility-limiting. That is changing and should change more rapidly (since, as I've said before, I think the best and most reliable political writing and analysis is found, with rare exception, in the blogosphere), but that bias persists and can still be somewhat limiting.<br /><br />Anyone who expends the substantial amounts of time and energy required for daily political blogging believes, I'd say almost by definition, that the more people who are exposed to what they write, the better. I think that objective will be fulfilled in multiple ways from this move.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(3)</span> A significant factor in moving to <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>was how positive my previous experiences have been in writing there. I have guest blogged for Tim Grieve on two occasions and written numerous articles over the last few months. The editors there are excellent and the suggestions they make are always intended to improve, not dilute, what one writes. And they are committed to publishing unique and consequential content which many other media outlets probably would be too timid to publish. Juan Cole writes for <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>with some regularity, and last December he <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/murderers-gibbet-cole-in-salon.html">said on his blog</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />See also Salon.com Editor's picks for 2006, ten articles that include my "Israel's Failed-State Policy."<br /><br />Consider subscribing to Salon.com for the coming year. Much of what I've written there in the past year would not have been published by most other magazines.<br /></blockquote><br />In addition to Cole, <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>regularly publishes Sidney Blumenthal, Joe Conason, Gary Kamiya, and Tom Tomorrow's <span style="font-style: italic;">This Modern World.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;">(4) </span>My principal concern about moving the blog was that I did not want to remove the blog or myself from the blogsphere. I think the blogosphere is and will continue to be the venue for the most vibrant and important political writing and I would not be interested in any arrangement which included the cessation of my blogging.<br /><br />But several bloggers have made similar blog moves -- most notably Kevin Drum to <span style="font-style: italic;">Washington Monthly </span>and Andrew Sullivan to <span style="font-style: italic;">Time </span>(as well as Mickey Kaus to <span style="font-style: italic;">Slate</span>) -- and it did not create any sensation that they were somehow blogging "outside" of the blogosphere. Access to my <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>blog will be free (albeit with the requirement of watching a short ad once per day for non-<span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>-subscribers). There will also be a link left at the top of this Blogspot page to the new <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>blog. Since what I am writing is still a blog in every sense, I became convinced that blogging at <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>rather than at "Blogspot" would not create some sort of wall of separation (psychological or otherwise) between my blog and the blogosphere.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(5)</span> One of the most valuable aspects of blogging is the Comment section. Almost all bloggers say that, and I think most, if not all of them, mean it. One of the prime advantages which bloggers have over mainstream journalists is the collective aspect of blogging. No matter how much one knows about a topic or how much expertise one has developed, there is always going to be someone who comes and adds something which the blogger did not know. For the same reason, bloggers' mistakes -- large and small -- are corrected almost instantaneously, and any credible blogger eagerly acknowledges those mistakes, corrects them quickly and clearly, and thereby is constantly perfecting what is written.<br /><br /><a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_01_21_atrios_archive.html#116956193137825120">This post</a> by Atrios from a couple of weeks ago really illustrates this dynamic perfectly. Atrios responded to a <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/the_clinton_playbook.html">post</a> by <span style="font-style: italic;">Time</span>'s Jay Carney which contained a clearly erroneous statement about Clinton's approval ratings which Atrios pointed out. He linked to the documentation demonstrating Carney's error. But then, within a short time after Atrios posted, several of the Eschaton commenters came and pointed out three additional, clear errors in Carney's post which Atrios did not originally include. He then added those commenters' points to his original post, which then became a virutal dossier of significant factual errors plaguing Carney's short post.<br /><br />Having a high-quality comment section is almost like having a vast team of researchers and analysts constantly at work on every topic, which is why so many of the posts I write include, and sometimes arise from, something said or found by a commenter here. There will be instantaneous and unrestrained commenting at the <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>blog, just as there is here, and so I hope, and expect, that the quality of the comment section will remain the same (and even be enhanced by what will undoubtedly be new commenters from <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon</span>)<span style="font-style: italic;">.</span><br /><br />The last post here will be on Wednesday. I will leave a post that will remain at the top with a link to the <span style="font-style: italic;">Salon </span>blog. I really appreciate the great support from readers and from other bloggers which I've received since I began blogging just a little over a year ago, and I'm definitely looking forward to blogging in an exciting, new environment.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/blog-news.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117032623420737466Thu, 01 Feb 2007 10:34:00 +00002007-02-01T13:44:32.523-02:00David Brooks, National Spokesman for "Americans"<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below - updated again)</span><br /><br />One of the most common tactics among pundits of all types, but particularly Bush-supporting and pro-war pundits, is to take whatever their own personal opinion happens to be, and then -- rather than stating that opinion and providing rationale or documentation for it -- they instead preface it with the phrase "<span style="font-style: italic;">Americans believe</span>" or "<span style="font-style: italic;">most Americans think</span>," thereby anointing themselves as Spokesman for The American People and casting the appearance that they speak on behalf of the Silent, Noble American Majority.<br /><br />Not only do they make these assertions about what "Americans believe" and what "the country wants" with no empirical evidence of any kind, but worse -- especially now that "Americans" have come to overwhelmingly reject them and their belief system -- they equate their own views with what "Americans want" in the face of mountains of empirical evidence which proves that the <span style="font-style: italic;">opposite</span> is true. John McCain, as but one example, <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/john-mccains-war-against-reality.html">does this</a> almost every time he speaks about Iraq and what "Americans think" about the war.<br /><br />David Brooks is one of the leading practitioners of this tactic, fancying himself as the vessel through which the majority of good, common Americans express themselves. His <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times </span><a href="http://select.nytimes.com/2007/02/01/opinion/01brooks.html?hp">column today</a> is based <span style="font-style: italic;">exclusively </span>on one of the most egregious and misleading instances of this tactic.<br /><br />His column is headlined <span style="font-style: italic;">The Iraq Syndrome, R.I.P.</span>, and in it, he simply asserts, over and over and over, that "Americans" -- in the wake of the Iraq disaster -- have not drawn any overarching lessons about U.S. foreign policy, as they did with Vietnam, but instead, Americans want (exactly, coincidentally enough, as Brooks wants) for the U.S. to continue to rule the world -- and particularly the Middle East -- with its mighty, dominant military power:<br /><blockquote><br />After Vietnam, Americans turned inward. Having lost faith in their leadership class, many Americans grew suspicious of power politics and hesitant about projecting American might around the world. . . .<br /><br />Today, Americans are disillusioned with the war in Iraq, and many around the world predict that an exhausted America will turn inward again. Some see a nation in permanent decline and an end to American hegemony. At Davos, some Europeans apparently envisioned a post-American world.<br /><br />Forget about it. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Americans are having a debate bout how to proceed in Iraq, but we are not having a strategic debate about retracting American power and influence.</span> What’s most important about this debate is what doesn’t need to be said. No major American leader doubts that America must remain, as Dean Acheson put it, the locomotive of the world. . . .<br /><br />This is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances. <span style="font-weight: bold;">This is not a country renouncing the threat of force. </span>This is not a country looking to come home again. The Iraq syndrome is over before it even had a chance to begin.</blockquote><br />To demonstrate what Americans <span style="font-style: italic;">really </span>think, Brooks cites what he calls the "masterful book" by Robert Kagan -- brother of Fred, the AEI's "surge" architect -- which argues that Americans want to assert as much power as possible in the world, and that they seek to use military power as part of our "efforts to spread freedom."<br /><br />The debate over Iraq is not resulting in a diminished desire to start wars, claims Brooks, but is merely "another chapter in [America's] long expansionist story." So anyone who thinks that an attack on, say . . . . Iran, is less likely because Americans oppose the war in Iraq should think again. Iraq is only about Iraq. Americans still crave the "dominant role in the world."<br /><br />Brooks' entire column purports to summarize what Americans believe and don't believe about U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. role in the world. There <span style="font-style: italic;">does</span> exist empirical evidence (beyond Robert Kagan) as to what "Americans" believe. That evidence is called "polling data." Yet such evidence is missing entirely from Brooks' column proclaiming what Americans think -- not a whisper about such data -- and it is not hard to understand why.<br /><br />Polls demonstrate that Brooks' entire column is false, that the opposite of what he claims is true. The neoconservative fantasies of David Brooks and Robert Kagan and John McCain and company for glorious U.S. world domination through military adventures are increasingly <span style="font-style: italic;">repudiated</span> by Americans. As but one example, the Pew Research Center <a href="http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=126">issued a report</a> accompanying new polling data on isolationism in American, dated February 3, 2006, entitled <b><i>Bush's Concern Over Isolationism Reflects More Than Just Rhetoric</i></b>. It documented:<br /><blockquote><br />When President Bush delivered a strong warning against isolationism in Tuesday's State of the Union address, he was speaking to a<span style="font-weight: bold;"> recent and dramatic turn</span> in public opinion. A recent Pew Research survey found a<span style="font-weight: bold;"> decided revival of isolationist sentiment among the public, to levels not seen since post-Cold War 1990s and the post-Vietnam 1970s.</span> Moreover, one of the main pillars of Bush's argument in favor of global engagement – the need to promote democracy around the world – has not struck a chord with the public. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Support for that objective has been consistently tepid, even among members of Bush's own party.</span></blockquote><br />Specifically, the notion that the U.S. should use military force to topple foreign governments and "spread freedom" -- the centerpiece of the Brooks/Kagan/McCain neoconservative worldview which Brooks claims is the mainstream -- is, in reality, about as fringe of a sentiment as one can find in the realm of foreign policy:<br /><blockquote><br />Of thirteen foreign policy priorities tested in Pew's October survey, "promoting democracy in other nations"<span style="font-weight: bold;"> came in dead last</span>, rated as a top priority by fewer than one-in-four Americans. Despite its lowest favorability rating in two decades, more Americans <span style="font-weight: bold;">see strengthening the United Nations as a top priority than promoting democracy. </span>And in contrast with public opinion on most foreign policy questions these days, there is no partisan divide – Republicans and Democrats agree that this goal should not be a major foreign policy priority.</blockquote><br />It is true that the Pew poll, taken almost a year ago when dissatisfaction with Iraq was not as intense as it is now, found that 42% of Americans agree with the proposition that the U.S. "should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own." But, directly contrary to Brooks' entire column, that sentiment is rapidly <span style="font-style: italic;">increasing</span>, and the notion that Americans share the neoconservative desire to spread democracy through military force is simply false.<br /><br />Writing in <span style="font-style: italic;">The New Republic </span>in November, 2005, John Judis -- unlike Brooks -- examined actual polling data rather than his own desires about what Americans should think, and <a href="http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w051121&s=judis112305">concluded</a>, in an article entitled <span style="font-style: italic;">Isolationism is Back</span>:<br /><span class="articlecontent"><blockquote><br />Under the impact of the administration's failure in Iraq, the public has become <span style="font-weight: bold;">wary of American involvement overseas.</span> It increasingly rejects both a liberal internationalist and a neoconservative approach to foreign affairs. Instead, its attitude is similar to the prevailing outlook of the 1920s and '30s and to the worldview held by many Americans in the '90s. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Voters, in short, are becoming more isolationist. </span>This change in mood will likely affect the elections of 2006 and 2008; and more important, it could affect how future American administrations conduct themselves in the world.</blockquote><br />Precisely because of the towering tragedy of our invasion of Iraq, Americans are rapidly growing to despise the militarism of David Brooks and -- as Judis points out -- of John McCain: "The presidential candidate who is probably <span style="font-weight: bold;">most out of step with these trends</span> in public opinion is John McCain, who favors sending additional troops to Iraq . . . ." And, all of that data was from late 2005 and early 2006. It is almost certainly the case that those anti-intervention trends have intensified as the situation in Iraq has collapsed.<br /><br />In August, 2006 -- in the middle of the Israel-Hezbollah war, as Brooks' former colleague Bill Kristol <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/433fwbvs.asp">proclaimed</a> that to be "our war" (meaning the United States) -- <span style="font-style: italic;">The Washington Post </span>and ABC News conducted a <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/postpoll_080606.htm">poll</a> which asked: "As part of a cease-fire agreement, would you support or oppose the United Nations sending a peacekeeping force to southern Lebanon?" A solid majority (67-30) favored a U.N. force.<br /><br />But even among those who supported such a force, a clear majority (38-59) said "no" when asked: <span style="font-weight: bold;">"Do you think the United States should or should not send U.S. troops as part of that peacekeeping force"</span>? Americans simply do not want increased U.S. involvement in more Middle East conflicts and wars, even where -- as was the case for Israel's war in Lebanon -- the conflict involves a group which Bush supporters endlessly refer to as "international terrorists."<br /><br />David Brooks has his own crystal clear opinions about U.S military force -- the more the better, especially in the Middle East. He believes we should be continuing more projects like Iraq, with the only difference being that we should do it better next time. "This is not a country renouncing the threat of force," he proclaims.<br /><br />But rather than honestly admit that the disaster in Iraq which he urged is causing Americans to reject Brooks' neoconservative and militaristic worldview, he instead dishonestly denies (really just ignores) the empirical evidence and clear trends and simply asserts that "Americans" agree with him on the fundamental questions of U.S. foreign policy. In doing so, he displays what really is the defining attribute of the Bush-supporting neoconservatives -- a willingness, even eagerness, to ignore empirical evidence, deny reality, in order to affirm what one <span style="font-style: italic;">wants to be true </span>rather than what is true.<br /><br />In reality, these pundits have complete disdain for American public opinion, because the American masses too frequently have the audacity to deviate from, and outright reject, the superior wisdom handed down by Brooks and Kagan and John McCain and the AEI and the rest. Like everything else -- U.S. soldiers, the Constitution, the concept of "America" -- what "Americans believe" is merely a prop to be used or exploited in order to advance their war-making and liberty-infringing agenda. So when American public opinion contradicts that agenda, they simply ignore it or distort it and claim -- even though it is so plainly false -- that those noble, silent "Americans" share their quest for neoconservative glory or whatever other radical view they happen to be pushing.<br /><br />The fact that Americans are increasingly rejecting the militarism which lies at the heart of the neoconservative worldview does not, of course, prove that that worldview is wrong. But the fact that Bush-supporting pundits and presidential candidates like John McCain continue to claim the mantle of Spokesmen for "Americans" even though their views are increasingly relegated to the fringe does reveal much about their character and credibility. The next time David Brooks goes to write a column in which he masquerades his own personal, fringe views as the "belief of Americans," perhaps his editors should suggest, or require, some proof to accompany that claim.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE:</u></b> One additional point: Brooks grounds his assertion about the ongoing American desire for Middle East hegemony in the claim that such a desire is shared by "the leaders emerging amid this [Iraq] crisis" -- Giuliani, McCain, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. Leaving aside the <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/11/20/obama.iraq/index.html">obvious</a> <a href="http://www.talkleft.com/story/2006/12/28/101645/42">grounds</a> for contesting the accuracy of that assertion, the fact that certain presidential candidates endorse Position X is hardly proof that Position X is shared by "most Americans."<br /><br />One of the tragic flaws of our current political system is that presidential candidates have to please numerous constituencies <span style="font-style: italic;">other than </span>the American voter. One is the large donor base which funds their campaigns. The other is the Beltway media and political elite, which can single-handedly destroy a candidate with tactics having nothing to do with the candidates' actual views (ask Howard Dean, or Al Gore). That leading presidential candidates share Brooks' desire for further military adventurism in the Middle East -- even if it were true -- is hardly proof that most Americans share that view. The "views of most Americans" is knowable by examining what "most Americans think," which is precisely why Brooks studiously avoids the only data relevant to the issue about which he is opining.<br /><br /><u><b>UPDATE II</b></u>: For those requiring still more proof that Bush supporters like David Brooks do not believe in the founding principles and values of our country, note that Brooks goes out of his way to proclaim that "this is not a country looking to avoid entangling alliances." Brooks issues as express a repudiation as can be of the central warning <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/george-washington-and-middle-east.html">issued by</a> George Washington in his 1796 Farewell Address. Of course, the Founders -- along with the Constitution they enacted and the principles they embraced -- were very, very pre-9/11, and their views are thus wholly inapplicable, even dangerous, in light of our current predicament.<br /><br />For Brooks and company, the real meaning of the 9/11 attacks was that we have to abandon the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the foundations of the country and replace all of that with the updated (and wholly contrary) views of Dick Cheney, John Yoo and Bill Kristol.</span>http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/02/david-brooks-national-spokesman-for.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117024659865202328Wed, 31 Jan 2007 12:15:00 +00002007-01-31T18:10:43.196-02:00Various items<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)<br /><br />(1) </span>NSA expert James Bamford makes a vital point in a <span style="font-style: italic;">New York Times </span><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/31/opinion/31bamford.html">Op-Ed</a> this morning: regardless of what happens with FISA issues going forward, George Bush violated the criminal law for the last five years by eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, and a federal court has already ruled that this is the case. Violations of FISA are felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine per offense.<br /><br />Judge Taylor's court ruling is not tantamount to a finding of criminal liability (other issues, such as intent, would need to be demonstrated, and all sorts of other procedural safeguards would be due), but -- as I argued <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/08/breaking-law-has-consequences.html">previously</a> -- it <span style="font-style: italic;">is </span>a binding ruling that the President's warrantless eavesdropping program violated the criminal law, and there is no justification for simply walking away from that and implicitly agreeing that there will be no consequences from the President's deliberate and continuous lawbreaking.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(2)</span> As expected, the administration is attempting to persuade the Sixth Circuit (which has before it the Government's appeal of Judge Taylor's ruling) to dismiss the NSA lawsuit on the ground that it is now "moot." Marty Lederman <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/01/update-on-sixth-circuit-litigation.html">details</a> the status of those efforts, including the Government's odd request that the case not only be dismissed, but Judge Taylor's order be <span style="font-style: italic;">vacated</span> -- a request Marty attributes to the desire on the part of the administration to preserve its ability to begin eavesdropping again in the future without warrants.<br /><br />Along those lines, one hopes to see some genuine and aggressive follow-up on the demand by Pat Leahy and other Senate Judiciary Committee members to learn exactly what the administration is doing now with the FISA court. Jim Webb's <a href="http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/002441.php">refusal</a> to be brushed off by the administration on the question of presidential authority to wage war against Iran ought to be the model used for this FISA issue and any other requests/demands for information made by the Congress. Genuine oversight is going to require vigilant, aggressive and relentless confrontation, not merely theatrics and earnest though inconsequential expressions of "concern."<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(3) </span>Terry "Nitpicker" Welch, who was formerly a Staff Sgt. and media affairs officer for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, <a href="http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2007/01/malkin-disgusts-me.html">responds</a> to the latest disgusting attempt by Michelle Malkin to cast a war journalist as an Al Qaeda ally. The target of Malkin's latest witch hunt is the courageous war correspondent for CBS News, Lara Logan (whose pointed and appropriately angry <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I420_fPM2E">response</a> several months ago to attacks by the Bush administration and Malkin-twin Laura Ingraham on journalists in Iraq was really superb -- if you haven't seen that, it is highly, highly recommended).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(4)</span> Via <a href="http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2007/01/austin-bays-mea-culpa.html">Blue Texan</a>, conservative blogger Austin Bay wrote a column in early December for the <span style="font-style: italic;">Austin-American Statesman </span>which, in essence, voiced the accusations which right-wing bloggers at the time were making about the Associated Press and Jamil Hussein. Unlike most of them, Bay has now acknowledged that those accusations were unfouned, and he did the honorable thing -- <a href="http://www.statesman.com/search/content/editorial/stories/01/26/26correx_edit.html">published his own correction</a> in the same paper, in which he wrote:<br /><blockquote><br />A columnist's mea culpa<br /><br />In a column that ran in the American-Statesman on Dec. 1, I wrote that I doubted that an Associated Press source for a story originating in Baghdad existed. The story involved an allegation that six Sunni Arabs were murdered and set on fire. <span style="font-weight: bold;">It turns out the AP source not only existed but had a two-year track record. The AP answered the questions raised on the two Web sites my column quoted. The Iraqi Ministry of Interior later admitted that police Capt. Jamil Hussein did work for the ministry in Baghdad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The AP and other wire services are the backbone of truth on this planet.</span> "New media" such as blogs still lack the reporting capacity of the wire services and major news operations. I am delighted to apologize to the Associated Press and congratulate the AP's Baghdad bureau for standing by their sources. </blockquote><br />Bush followers wage war on any institutions which report facts, hence their hatred for the media, for Congressional oversight, for whistle-blowers. But as Bay notes, even with all of their flaws, we rely upon large media organizations to collect facts and keep us informed. That is particularly true for journalists in war zones (whatever you know about the Bush administration or Iraq or anything else that they did not want you to know, you know because journalists discovered and then reported it).<br /><br />Those who want the media to improve criticize them. Those who want to block this truth-reporting function altogether wage war on the press and try to destroy their credibility completely. Most people do the former, while Bush followers (and the administration itself) do the latter. Bay, despite being a media critic, correctly ackonwledges what a critical function news organizations continue to perform. (And, just incidentally, congratulations are in order for Blue Texan, as he has <a href="http://instaputz.blogspot.com/2007/01/funny-thing-about-blogs_4675.html">picked</a> up a new (or maybe not-so-new) reader).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(5)</span> German prosecutors have <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/31/AR2007013100283.html">issued arrest warrants</a> for the individuals involved in what they are calling the kidnapping -- and that is what it was -- of Khaled al-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, who was abducted by the CIA and taken to Afghanistan and several other countries as part of our so-called "rendition" program, only to be released when it turned out he had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism (as the Bush administration has privately admitted).<br /><br />This is not a case of German prosecutors asserting universal jurisdiction in order to prosecute alleged war crimes that have nothing to do with Germany (a practice which, for reasons I set forth <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/11/germanys-claim-to-universal-power-over.html">previously</a>, I find objectionable). Instead, this is a German citizen who was kidnapped <strike>from Germany</strike> on his way from Germany to Macedonia with no due process whatsoever (and, needless to say, <a href="http://slate.com/id/2142155">blocked</a> by the Bush administration from obtaining justice in American courts). That is a crime and should be treated as one. (<span style="font-weight: bold;">ADDED</span>: It was Italy which previously issued arrest warrants for 25 CIA officers and an Air Force officer for kidnapping an Egyptian-born cleric off the streets of Milan and "rendering" him to Egypt for some torture).<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(6) </span>Hilzoy <a href="http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/01/this_slow_and_d.html#more">details</a> the treatment of Chinese Uighur detainees at Guantanamo who are being held in round-the-clock <span style="font-style: italic;">solitary confinement </span>even though, as Hilzoy says, they "were captured by bounty hunters nearly five years ago. They are in all likelihood innocent of any crime, and of any act against the United States; they have certainly never been tried and convicted of any." Hilzoy's discussion of this matter is characteristically thorough and well worth reading. One runs out of adjectives to describe things like this.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(7) </span>In an obviously growing trend of political campaigns hiring bloggers, Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte has been <a href="http://pandagon.net/2007/01/30/pandagon-changes/">hired by</a> the John Edwards presidential campaign. That is part of a larger trend whereby the blogosphere is slowly ceasing to be its own closed, separate system and is instead seeping into, even merging with, all of the more traditional political and journalistic institutions. Whether that is something to celebrate or lament (and a case can probably be made for both), it is undoubtedly happening and will continue.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><br />Time</span>'s new blog, Swampland, illustrates that trend. I'm no fan, to put it mildly, of any of the four <span style="font-style: italic;">Time </span>writers at that blog, but they deserve credit for being much more <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/broder_the_blogosphere_strikes.html">responsive to</a>, and interactive with, both <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/reporting_101.html">commenters</a> and <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/bushs_planthe_rest_of_the_stor_1.html">other bloggers</a> than journalists of that type usually are.<br /><br />That Joe Klein and Karen Tumulty now regularly and directly hear criticism of their work <a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2007_01_21_atrios_archive.html#116956193137825120">from Atrios</a> and company and even periodically <a href="http://time-blog.com/swampland/2007/01/re_the_clinton_playbook_1.html">engage</a> that criticism can only have positive effects. That <span style="font-style: italic;">Time </span>took some of its most establishment journalists and basically stuck them in the middle of the blogosphere, and that those journalists almost seem to relish their role as bloggers (albeit ones who represent and defend traditional, mainstream journalism), is, I think, an important and (more or less) positive development.<br /><br />Along these lines, I will have a significant announcement about this blog in the next day or two. I apologize for the substance-less teaser, but I can't announce it yet, but it also seemed inexcusably coy to make the point I just made about the blogosphere without making clear that a related development is occurring with this blog and will be finalized in a day or so. The development is purely positive and I'm excited about it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"><u>UPDATE</u></span>:<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(8)</span> One of the real downsides to Hillary Clinton's candidacy -- aside from the re-emergence of the <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-et-cause30jan30,1,6215905.story?coll=la-headlines-">dreadful egomaniac</a>, Terry McAuliffe (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/117017591408022209/#87675">EWO</a>) -- is that we're going to be subjected to all of the truly unpleasant psychological reactions which the Clintons generally trigger in people (especially journalists), but in this case, that will be severely exacerbated by all of the true psychological crises provoked by the possibility of a woman becoming the Chief Executive (and the "Commander-in-Chief") -- and not just any woman, but <span style="font-style: italic;">Hillary</span>.<br /><br />Digby <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007_01_01_digbysblog_archive.html#117020064026926400">examines</a> -- in a hilarious though depressingly accurate way -- all of the issues revealed by Chris Matthews' discussion of the "Hillary joke," and included in the post is equally excellent analysis on the topic from the invaluable <a href="http://www.dailyhowler.com">Bob Somerby</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(9) </span>Now that Michelle Malkin and one of the blogger-employees she took along with her on her four-day, military-protected trip to Iraq have returned, they have <a href="http://sadlyno.com/archives/4933.html">begun claiming</a> (the former implicitly, the latter explicitly) that they have special insight about the war and that nobody can disagree with their claims about the war who hasn't <span style="font-style: italic;">been there</span>:<br /><blockquote><br />I’m not one to deploy the chickenhawk argument, but there really is something to the notion that unless you’ve seen a thing with your own eyes you may have a hard time understanding it. If you’re writing about a thing as often as Sullivan writes about the war, especially if you spend the bulk of your writings denouncing that thing, it’s irresponsible to stay as far away from that thing as possible. You have to, at some point, examine it for yourself.<br /></blockquote><br />Apparently, it's perfectly fine to cheer on the war without visiting Iraq (as they did for the last four years), but criticizing the war is terribly inappropriate for those who haven't paid that country a visit. D. Aristophanes at Sadly, No entertainingly <a href="http://sadlyno.com/archives/4933.html">gives</a> that "argument" all of the respect it deserves.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(10)</span> I highly, highly recommend this 1987 Bill Moyers PBS <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3799314405910661612">documentary</a> on the Iran-Contra scandal specifically, and U.S. covert military operations generally. Moyers has a clear viewpoint that he does not try to hide, but the documentary is filled with indisputable and well-documented facts and superbly constructed. I linked to it yesterday, but only in a late update, so you may not have seen it.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">(11)</span> The German newspaper <span style="font-style: italic;">Spiegel</span> has a must-read <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,462782,00.html">interview</a> with Tyler Drumheller, the former chief of the CIA's Europe division, on issues ranging from rendition to the CIA's pre-war WMD conclusions (h/t <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,462782,00.html">MD</a>). The interview speaks for itself, though it is amazing how little our own media reports things of this sort.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/various-items_31.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117017591408022209Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:37:00 +00002007-02-07T19:09:23.136-02:00Republicans and Congress' war powers -- then and nowRuss Feingold today is <a href="http://judiciary.senate.gov/hearing.cfm?id=2504">chairing a Committee hearing</a> in order to demonstrate that Congress has the Constitutional authority to compel the President to withdraw troops from Iraq, a power that is not merely confined to cutting off appropriations. Sen. Feingold is holding the hearing in the face of claims -- mostly from Congressional Republicans and their supporters -- that only the President has the power to make determinations about troop deployments, and Congress' only power is one of appropriations.<br /><br />Back in September, when Chris Wallace falsely accused Bill Clinton of emboldening the Terrorists by prematurely cutting-and-running from Somalia (a favorite right-wing meme), it was <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/who-wanted-to-cut-and-run-from-somalia.html">documented here</a> (as Clinton himself pointed out to Wallace) that it was actually Republican Senators who <span style="font-style: italic;">forced </span>Clinton to withdraw troops by imposing troop withdrawal deadlines on him and threatening further restrictions on his ability to keep troops there. But if one goes back and reviews that debate, it is quite striking that Republicans back then certainly did not seem to believe that Congress lacked the ability to restrict the President's power to deploy troops. They argued exactly the opposite - that they had that power -- and they <span style="font-style: italic;">used it</span> to force Clinton out of Somalia (all excerpts are available <a href="http://thomas.loc.gov/home/r103query.html">here</a>, by searching "Somalia):<br /><br />John McCain's stirring pro-withdrawal Senate speech about why it was urgent that the Senate <span style="font-style: italic;">force</span> Clinton to leave Somalia is particularly interesting in light of all of his <span style="font-style: italic;">completely contrary </span>claims today about Iraq:<br /><br /><u><b>Sen. John McCain - October 19, 1993</b></u><br /><blockquote><br />There is no reason for the United States of America to remain in Somalia. The American people want them home, I believe the majority of Congress wants them home, and to set an artificial date of March 31 or even February 1, in my view, is not acceptable. The criteria should be to bring them home as rapidly and safely as possible, an evolution which I think could be completed in a matter of weeks.<br /><br />Our continued military presence in Somalia allows another situation to arise which could then lead to the wounding, killing or capture of American fighting men and women. We should do all in our power to avoid that.<br /><br />I listened carefully to the President's remarks at a news conference that he held earlier today. I heard nothing in his discussion of the issue that would persuade me that further U.S. military involvement in the area is necessary. In fact, his remarks have persuaded me more profoundly that we should leave and leave soon.<br /><br />Dates certain, Mr. President, are not the criteria here. What is the criteria and what should be the criteria is our<span style="font-weight: bold;"> immediate, orderly withdrawal from Somalia. </span>And if we do not do that and other Americans die, other Americans are wounded, other Americans are captured because we stay too long--longer than necessary--then I would say that the <span style="font-weight: bold;">responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States who did not exercise their authority under the Constitution of the United States and mandate that they be brought home quickly and safely as possible. . . .<br /></span><br />I know that this debate is going to go on this afternoon and I have a lot more to say, but the argument that somehow the United States would suffer a loss to our prestige and our viability, as far as the No. 1 superpower in the world, I think is baloney. <span style="font-weight: bold;">The fact is, we won the cold war. The fact is, we won the Persian Gulf conflict. And the fact is that the United States is still the only major world superpower.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">I can tell you what will erode our prestige. I can tell you what will hurt our viability as the world's superpower, and that is if we enmesh ourselves in a drawn-out situation which entails the loss of American lives, more debacles like the one we saw with the failed mission to capture Aideed's lieutenants, using American forces, and that then will be what hurts our prestige.</span><br /><br />We suffered a terrible tragedy in Beirut, Mr. President; 240 young marines lost their lives, but we got out. Now is the time for us to get out of Somalia as rapidly and as promptly and as safely as possible.<br /><br />I, along with many others, will have an <span style="font-weight: bold;">amendment that says exactly that.</span> It does not give any date certain. It does not say anything about any other missions that the United States may need or feels it needs to carry out.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> It will say that we should get out as rapidly and orderly as possible.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span></blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen Strom Thurmond (R-SC) - October 5, 1993</b></u><br /><blockquote><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">It is past time for the Congress to come to grips with this sorry spectacle and force the administration to find a way out of the quagmire</span>--before Somalia becomes the pattern for future United States missions with the United Nations.</blockquote><br /><b><u>Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX), October 7</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />The President's decision to extend our presence for 6 more months is<span style="font-weight: bold;"> totally unacceptable to me and totally unacceptable, I believe, to the Congress.</span><br /><br />If the people of Texas--who are calling my phones every moment, who are sending me letters and telegrams by the hour--are representative of the will of the American people, the American people do not believe that we should allow Americans to be targets in Somalia for 6 more months. I cannot see anything that we would achieve in 6 more months in Somalia</blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Dirk Kempthorne (R-ID), October 5</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />Mr. President, it is time for our troops to come home. I would give this directive to the military leadership and that is that they are to use whatever means they determine necessary to secure the release of American POW's in Somalia, because to leave them behind would be to issue adeath sentence to those Americans, and that is absolutely unacceptable.<br /><br />But, Mr. President, the longer we leave United States troops in Somalia under U.N. command, the longer we leave United States troops in unjustified danger. I owe my allegiance to the United States, not to the United Nations. <span style="font-weight: bold;">It is time for the Senate of the United States to get on with the debate, to get on with the vote, and to get the American troops home.</span></blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Slade Gorton, October 6,1993 (R-WA)</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />We are in a disaster, Mr. President. If we had retreated earlier, we would have left fewer dead Americans behind. It is time to retreat now and leave no more dead Americans behind and to learn the lesson that American power should be used only where we have a clear stake in a conflict, a clear goal to be achieved, the clear means to reach that goal, and the potential of clear support on the part of the American people.<br /><br />As none of those exist in Somalia today, it is time to leave.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> And for this body, it is time to debate this issue </span>and not the nomination of an Assistant Attorney General.</blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Jesse Helms - October 6, 1993 (R-NC)</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />Mr. President, <span style="font-weight: bold;">the United States has no constitutional authority, as I see it, to sacrifice U.S. soldiers</span> to Boutros-Ghali's vision of multilateral peacemaking. Again, I share the view of Senator Byrd that the time to get out is now. We can take care of that criminal warlord over there. We have the means to do it and the capacity to do it. But it ought to be done by the United Nations. I do not want to play in any more U.N. games. I do not want any more of our people under the thumb of any U.N. commander--none.<br /><br />As a matter of fact, while we are at it, it is high time we reviewed the War Powers Act, which, in the judgment of this Senator, should never have been passed in the first place. <span style="font-weight: bold;">The sole constitutional authority to declare war rests, according to our Founding Fathers, right here in the Congress of the United States, and not on Pennsylvania Avenue. </span>I voted against the War Powers Act. If it were to come up again today, I would vote against it. I have never regretted my opposition to it. </blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Alan Simpson (R-WY) - October 6</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />Let me close by saying I am willing to support our President, our Commander in Chief, <span style="font-weight: bold;">if</span> we have a policy either for decisive, potent, and powerful military action, without quarter, without reservation--or obviously for us instead to withdraw from Somalia.<br /><br />What I <span style="font-weight: bold;">cannot continue to support is the continuing endangerment of Americans in the service of a policy that remains absolutely mysterious and totally muddled.</span><br /></blockquote><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Judd Gregg (R-NH) - October 4</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />And, thus, I hope that we, as a Senate, will proceed to discuss the issue of Somalia in the near future, in the immediate future, before any more American lives are lost; and that we shall put into definition and some focus what is our purpose there and, most importantly, how we intend to disengage or, if it is our decision,<span style="font-weight: bold;"> how we intend to engage pursuant to the laws which we, as a nation, have as a constitutional democracy.</span></blockquote><br />In fact, one of the very few politicians who has been consistent in his views on this question is -- unsurprisingly -- Russ Feingold, who argued then what he argues now: namely, that the Constitution vests war-making power in the Congress and that Congress can (and, in both cases, should) restrict the President's use of military force:<br /><br /><u><b>Sen. </b></u><b><u>Russ Feingold (D-WI) - October 5</u></b><br /><blockquote><br />In February, I declined to cosponsor the Senate resolution which was introduced and passed in 1 day because I thought the resolution was too vague in terms of the United States mission and duration of our commitment in Somalia. It was also because of the War Powers Act, because of a lack of congressional approval for this specific mission, that I, with six of my colleagues, voted against that resolution in the DOD bill. It turns out, I believe, that the original resolution, w<span style="font-weight: bold;">hich mandated a withdrawal of U.S. troops within 30 days unless continuation was authorized by a specific act of Congress, was probably the correct position.</span><br /><br />I join several of my colleagues who have spoken today to say that we should leave Somalia now: we should not increase the American troop level or increase our involvement. Our continued presence risks not only more American lives but also the possibility that the worldwide broadcasting of the mistreatment of U.S. prisoners will so inflame our national pride that it will be increasingly difficult to leave.</blockquote><br />When Bill Clinton was President, most of the country's leading Republicans did not seem to have any problem at all with Congressional "interference" in the President's decisions to deploy troops (really to maintain troop deployments, since President Bush 41 first deployed in Somalia). There wasn't any talk back then (at least from them) about the burden of "535 Commanders-in-Chief" or "Congressional incursions" into the President's constitutional warmaking authority. They debated restrictions that ought to be legislatively imposed on President Clinton's military deployments and then imposed them.<br /><br />And Sen. McCain in particular made arguments in favor of Congressionally-mandated withdraw that are patently applicable to Iraq today. And he specifically argued with regard to forcible troop withdrawal that "<span style="font-weight: bold;">responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States.</span>" The Constitution hasn't changed since 1993, so I wonder what has prompted such a fundamental shift in Republican views on the proper role of Congressional war powers.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/republicans-and-congress-war-powers.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117015827601556581Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:31:00 +00002007-01-30T23:36:44.236-02:00Andrew Sullivan and the hollow "Conservative Soul"<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below)</span><br /><br />There is a serious fraud emerging in the political landscape that, though easily <a href="http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2005_11_20_digbysblog_archive.html#113304649195203560">predictable</a> and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-perlstein/i-didnt-like-nixon-_b_11735.html">predicted</a>, is now being perpetrated with full force -- namely, that the so-called "conservative movement" is <span style="font-style: italic;">not responsible </span>for the destruction wrought on the country by the Bush presidency and the loyal Republican Congress which followed him. Even more audaciously, the claim is emerging that the "conservative movement" is actually the prime <span style="font-style: italic;">victim </span>here<span style="font-style: italic;">, </span>because its lofty "principles" have been betrayed and repudiated by the President and the Congress which have ruled our country for the last six years.<br /><br />This cry of victimization was the principal theme at the <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YzFkMzk3MmIzYTcwMmU0N2Q5M2U0YmI5MDkwNDQ5NzI=">so-called</a> "National Review Institute conservative summit" held this weekend, at which one conservative luminary after the next paraded on stage to lament that the unpopular President and rejected GOP-controlled Congress "abandoned" conservatism and failed for that reason. As but one illustrative example, <a href="http://www2.nationalreview.com/nrisummit/newt256K.mov">here</a> is <span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span> Editor Rich Lowry in his opening remarks, introducing Newt Gingrich, whom Lowry afterwards <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=ZDViMWU0MjRhOTVlN2NiM2QwMDhkOTc5ZTdhZjVmMjM=">described</a> as "inspiring, brilliant, creative, visionary":<br /><blockquote><br />It is, in all seriousness, it is a distressing and depressing time to be a conservative. I'm reminded of the old saying by Mao -- things are always darkest before they go completely black.<br /><br />In recent years, we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its utter disinterest in the reforms that America needs. And at the same time, we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party and, more importantly, fail to take the steps - until perhaps now - fail to take the steps to win a major foreign war. . . .<br /><br />So we need to figure out a way how to make conservative policy and principles appealing and relevant again to the American public, and we need to do it together. </blockquote><br />Note the passive tone Lowry uses to signify a lack of agency, even victimhood -- "we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself . . . " and "we watched a Republican President abet or passively accept the excesses of his Congressional party . . . . " Poor Lowry and his fellow movement conservatives: they have stood by helplessly and with such sadness as the country was damaged by a President and Congress which abandoned and violated their conservative principles and left conservatives isolated and with nowhere to turn.<br /><br />But the deceit here is manifest. Lowry and his "conservative" comrades were anything but passive observers over the last six years. They did far more than "watch" as the President and the Congress "disgraced" themselves and damaged this country. It was self-identified "conservatives" who were the principal cheerleaders, the most ardent and loyal propagandists, propping up George Bush and his blindly loyal Republican Congress.<br /><br />It was they who continuously told America that George Bush was the <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_11_02_corner-archive.asp#019382">unified reincarnation</a> of the Great American Conservative Hero Ronald Reagan and the Great Warrior Defender of Freedom, Winston Churchill, all wrapped up in one glorious, powerful package. It was this same conservative movement -- now pretending to lament the abandonment of conservatism by Bush and the Congress -- which was the <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/11/george-bush-and-gop-house-leaders.html">single greatest source of Bush's political support</a>, which twice elected him and propped up his presidency and the movement which followed it.<br /><br />So why, after six years of glorifying George Bush and devoting their full-fledged loyalty to him and the GOP-controlled Congress are conservatives like Lowry and Gingrich suddenly insisting that Bush is an anti-conservative and the GOP-led Congress the opposite of conservative virtue? The answer is as obvious as it is revealing. They are desperately trying to disclaim responsibility for the disasters that they wrought in the name of "conservatism," by repudiating the political figures whom they named as the standard-bearers of their movement but whom America has now so decisively rejected.<br /><br />George Bush has not changed in the slightest. He is exactly the same as he was when he was converted into the hero and icon of the "conservative movement." The only thing that has changed is that Bush is no longer the wildly popular President which conservatives sought to embrace, but instead is a deeply disliked figured, increasingly detested by Americans, from whom conservatives now wish to shield themselves. And in this regard, these self-proclaimed great devotees of Conservative Political Principles have revealed themselves to have <span style="font-style: italic;">none</span>.<br /><br />When he was popular, George Bush was the Embodiment of Conservatism. Now that he is rejected on a historic scale, he is the Betrayer of Conservatism. That is because "Conservatism" -- while definable on a theoretical plane -- has come to have no practical meaning in this country other than a quest for ever-expanding government power for its own sake. When George Bush enabled those ends, he was The Great Conservative. Now that he impedes them, he is the Judas of the Conservative Movement. It is just that simple and transparent.<br /><br />* * * * *<br /><br />It is in this context that Andrew Sullivan's book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Conservative-Soul-How-Lost-Back/dp/0060188774/sr=8-1/qid=1170158957/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0349734-3553614?ie=UTF8&s=books"><span style="font-style: italic;">The Conservative Soul</span></a>, is highly worth reading, both because of how revealing and frustrating it is at the same time. Sullivan was one of the very few conservatives who repudiated Bush and the Bush movement when Bush was still popular.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/1600/958251/conserv.soul.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer;" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/1794/1771/320/622621/conserv.soul.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br />He did so based on the recognition that the Bush presidency never had anything to do with the Goldwater/Reagan "conservative principles" which one finds in textbooks and think tanks (but never in reality). Instead, the Bush movement is a rank fundamentalist and authoritarian movement which sought to vest virtually unlimited power in George Bush as Leader (and will do the same with its next Leader), and to <span style="font-style: italic;">expand</span>, rather than contract, federal power in order to forcibly implement its view of the Good and to perpetuate its own power. <span style="font-style: italic;">That </span>is what "political conservatism" in this country has become.<br /><br />Sullivan's general critique of the Bush administration, and his specific complaint that it has fundamentally deviated from the abstract conservative principles to which people like Lowry profess fidelity, is both accurate and persuasive. Along those lines, Sullivan cites the borderline-religious belief in tax cuts, depicted not as sound policy but as a moral good, to be pursued "unrelated to any empirical context of consistent rationale," and thus imposed even in the face of suffocating deficits and the virtually unprecedented expansion of government spending.<br /><br />And it was this same evangelical certainty in the movement's Rightness that not only led the administration to invade Iraq but to persist in the occupation and to insist that things were going well, even in the face of mountains of undeniable empirical evidence to the contrary:<br /><blockquote><br />In that worldview, what matters was the ideological analysis: good versus evil. What mattered was the assertion of the United States' right to act alone if necessary to defend its own security. What mattered was the zero-sum analysis that we had to choose between war against Saddam and a potential mushroom cloud in an American city. It was this rigid and abstract analysis that essentially abolished the idea that the war was subject to rational debate. . . . The fundamentalist makes his mind up instantly, makes the fundamental decision, and cannot, by necessity, stop short at a later date and ask himself if he's right. Such second-guessing undermines his entire worldview. It threatens his psychological core.</blockquote><br />And this authoritarian mindset, as John Dean so ably documented, leads to all sorts of excesses and amoral behavior. As Sullivan put it: "Self-surrender to authority first; conscience and self-determination second."<br /><br />So this is all well and good as far as it goes. Personally (and I'm aware that this is going to grate on a lot of sensibilities), I think Sullivan is an excellent writer and a commendable and insightful political thinker. As is evident from his book and his blog, he explicitly examines and frequently re-visits the first principles underlying his beliefs, which is why he is open to rational opposition and to changing his mind about his political views, even on fundamental questions. That is a trait that is all too rare.<br /><br />That is what makes <span style="font-style: italic;">The Conservative Soul</span> worth reading. It highlights the true philosophical and psychological roots of the Bush movement -- its first principles -- and reveals just how rotted those fundamentalist roots are. It does this as well as, if not better than, any other book has done. And it makes a unique and compelling case for the virtue of doubt, something from which anyone with strong political convictions would probably benefit.<br /><br />As is true for many people who are driven by their passions, Sullivan himself is certainly prone to excessive, blinding emotion arising from his own self-righteous certainties. That is a flaw that has led him astray in the past into hysteria-based crusades and rather ignoble accusations against others who expressed certain political views, including anti-war and anti-Bush views which Sullivan himself has now come to embrace.<br /><br />His admissions of error in that regard, while commendable, are less complete and repentant than one would like. He refers to his "analytical errors in the past few years" -- meaning, principally, his support for the war in Iraq specifically and the Bush presidency generally -- but then attributes those errors to a noble cause: "outrage at the atrocity of September 11."<br /><br />But Sullivan was not merely wrong on the question of Iraq and related matters. He was really one of the leaders of the ugly lynch mobs which impugned not just the judgment, but the motives and patriotism, of Americans who did not succumb to the errors of judgment and raging hysteria which consumed Sullivan. And it's certainly understandable that some people, particularly those who were the targets of that bile, are unlikely ever to think positively about him.<br /><br />On balance, though, I think the virtues of Sullivan as a political commentator easily outweigh his sins, and <span style="font-style: italic;">The Conservative Soul </span>illustrates why. When he was cheering on George Bush and the Iraq invasion in 2002 and 2003, Sullivan was a virtual hero to Bush supporters. He was far and away the most popular right-wing pundit at the time, and he had a large and loyal constituency. He could have easily maintained and even expanded that popularity -- and preserved the material and other advantages which accompany it -- simply by adhering to his views.<br /><br />But he didn't do that. He gradually recognized what the Bush movement really was and, as a result, turned on the President and repudiated the political movement which was his fan base. He did so even though he had to know that he would never really be welcomed by liberals, with whom he had been warring for a decade at least. Knowingly alienating oneself from one's core supporters, while being well-aware that it is likely to leave one isolated and without a real constituency, is a commendable act which requires courage. Courage is also required to publicly repudiate one's prior, emphatically advocated positions. That's something which most people, I think, would find very difficult, if not impossible, to do.<br /><br />And, as an aside, because he has been such a polarizing figure, Sullivan's courage in other, even more important respects has been quite under-appreciated -- courage exemplified by being openly gay at a time when most people weren't, and as part of a political movement where that could only impede him; being one of the first public figures in America to openly disclose his HIV status and to talk openly about living with the virus; and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Virtually-Normal-Andrew-Sullivan/dp/0679746145/sr=8-11/qid=1170161996/ref=sr_1_11/002-0349734-3553614?ie=UTF8&s=books">advocating</a> gay marriage long before it was anything remotely like a mainstream topic. Though most people have a strident and absolute view of Sullivan one way or the other, he is a complicated, intelligent, thoughtful and unpredictable political commentator -- open to modifying his views and admitting error -- all of which sets him apart -- and, I think, above -- the majority of the trite, standardized, lifeless pundits who dominate our political discourse.<br /><br />* * * * * *<br /><br />All of this brings us back to Rich Lowry and Newt Gingrich and the emerging deceit which the conservative movement is attempting to perpetrate. In contrast to the vast majority of so-called "conservatives" who loyally stood by and cheered on the Bush Presidency and the "disgraced" Republican Congress, there <span style="font-style: italic;">were </span>a handful of conservatives who -- long before Bush's popularity collapsed -- were pointing out just how "un-conservative" the Bush movement was. Sullivan was one such person, along with people like Bruce Bartlett and Pat Buchanan and <span style="font-style: italic;">The American Conservative</span>. And they were treated like blasphemers and pariahs by the Lowry/<span style="font-style: italic;">National Review</span>/Gingrich/<span style="font-style: italic;">Weekly Standard</span> conservatives, because the "Conservative Movement" became synonymous with the Bush Movement, and it therefore became impossible to repudiate the latter without being cast out of the former.<br /><br />One of the principal flaws of Sullivan's book is that it speaks of "political conservatism" in a way that exists only in the abstract but never in reality. The fabled Goldwater/Reagan small-government "conservatism of doubt" which Sullivan hails -- like the purified, magnanimous form of Communism -- exists, for better or worse, only in myth.<br /><br />While it is true that Bush has presided over extraordinary growth in federal spending, so did Reagan. Though Bush's deficit spending exceeds that of Reagan's, it does so only by degree, not level. The pornography-obsessed Ed Meese and the utter lawlessness of the Iran-contra scandal were merely the Reagan precursors to the Bush excesses which Sullivan finds so "anti-conservative." The Bush presidency is an extension, an outgrowth, of the roots of political conservatism in this country, not a betrayal of them.<br /><br />All of the attributes which have made the Bush presidency so disastrous are not in conflict with political conservatism <span style="font-style: italic;">as it exists in reality</span>. Those attributes -- vast expansions of federal power to implement moralistic agendas and to perpetuate political power, along with authoritarian faith in the Leader -- are not violations of "conservative principles." Those have become the defining attributes of the Conservative Movement in this country.<br /><br />That is why the warnings from Sullivan and others that the Republican Party was acting in violation of "conservative principles" fell on deaf ears and even prompted such hostility -- until, that is, Bush's popularity collapsed. "Conservative principles" are marketing props used by the Conservative Movement to achieve political power, not actual beliefs. Sullivan's principal argument that the Bush presidency never adhered to conservative principles is true enough, but the same can be said of the entire American conservative political movement. That is why they bred and elevated George Bush for six years, and suddenly "realized" that he was "not a conservative" only once political expediency required it.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE</u></b>: For a sense of just how much of a precursor the Reagan administration was with regard to the Bush administration's sheer lawlessness, I highly recommend this <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3799314405910661612">superb 1987 Bill Moyers documentary</a> on the Iran-Contra affair (which features convict Elliot Abrams, a member of both administrations). Some of the parallels are quite astounding, really almost exact (h/t reader CW). Respect for the "rule of law" is, of course, included in the Pantheon of Conservative Principles.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/andrew-sullivan-and-hollow.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117015600148365905Tue, 30 Jan 2007 11:14:00 +00002007-01-30T12:42:44.016-02:00George Washington and the Middle EastGeorge Washington's 1796 <a href="http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/washing.htm">Farewell Address</a> is an amazingly prescient warning to the U.S. to avoid certain dangers with regard to foreign policy. As we become more and more entangled in the intricacies not only of regional politics in the Middle East, but also in the domestic political conflicts of virtually every significant Middle East country, it almost seems as though we have purposely set out to violate every principle of foreign affairs which Washington articulated:<br /><blockquote><br />Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . . . .<br /><br />In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that<span style="font-weight: bold;"> permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded;</span> and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. </span><br /><br />It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest. Antipathy in one nation against another disposes each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable, when accidental or trifling occasions of dispute occur. Hence, frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests.<br /><br />The nation, prompted by ill-will and resentment, sometimes impels to war the government, contrary to the best calculations of policy. The government sometimes participates in the national propensity, and adopts through passion what reason would reject; at other times it makes the animosity of the nation subservient to projects of hostility instigated by pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives. The peace often, sometimes perhaps the liberty, of nations, has been the victim.<br /><br />So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.<br /><br />It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.<br /><br />As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, such attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do they afford to tamper with domestic factions, to practice the arts of seduction, to mislead public opinion, to influence or awe the public council? Such an attachment of a small or weak towards a great and powerful nation dooms the former to be the satellite of the latter.<br /><br />Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence (I conjure you to believe me, fellow-citizens) the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government. But that jealousy to be useful must be impartial; else it becomes the instrument of the very influence to be avoided, instead of a defense against it. Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.<br /><br />The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop. Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none; or a very remote relation. Hence she must be engaged in frequent controversies, the causes of which are essentially foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities.</blockquote><br />One could, I suppose, debate the extent to which some of Washington's specific warnings are currently being ignored by our foreign policy and by our debates over that policy. But what seems beyond dispute is that our foreign policy is being driven by three principal goals -- (1) shaping, dictating and even changing (through various means) the governments of almost every Middle Eastern country that exists ("regime change" is a concise summary of the policy against which Washington most stridently warned); (2) what Washington called "inveterate antipathy" against a particular nation -- Iran -- notwithstanding its <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=FA0D11FF3A550C718EDDAB0994DE404482">repeated</a> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A32732-2001Dec27?language=printer">efforts</a> (all of which have been<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/17/AR2006061700727_pf.html"> rebuffed</a> by the Bush administration) to achieve rapprochement with the U.S.; and (3) <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/433fwbvs.asp">equating</a> hostility towards Israel with hostility, even threats, towards the U.S.<br /><br />If one set out with the specific objective of creating a foreign policy in the Middle East that sought out as much as possible the dangers against which Washington warned --<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span>"permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others" as well as "frequent collisions, obstinate, envenomed, and bloody contests" caused by "[a]ntipathy in one nation against another dispos[ing] each more readily to offer insult and injury, to lay hold of slight causes of umbrage, and to be haughty and intractable" -- one would end up with our current Middle East policy.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/george-washington-and-middle-east.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117006858915652249Mon, 29 Jan 2007 10:44:00 +00002007-01-29T10:54:28.973-02:00Our little ChurchillsWe've now arrived at the point where the White House and its followers reflexively characterize<span style="font-style: italic;"> any</span> criticism of the Leader's war of any kind as aid to the Enemy and an attack on our troops. They don't even bother any more to pretend that some types of criticism are "acceptable." It is now the duty of every patriotic American to cheer enthusiastically for the President's decisions. Anything else is tantamount to siding with the Enemy.<br /><br />Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, whose criticism of the war has been as muted and restrained as can be, "<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/28/AR2007012800544.html">accused</a> President Bush of trying to pass the problems in Iraq on to the next president and described his actions as 'the height of irresponsibility.'" The White House's immediate response: that is a "partisan attack that sends the wrong message to our troops, our enemies and the Iraqi people." That's the only response the Bush movement now even bothers to make: those who speak against the Leader hate the troops and help the Enemy.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/01/sam_brownback_joe_lieberman_ro.html">Here</a> is Bill Kristol yesterday on Fox telling Sen. John Warner -- literally -- that his duty as an American and a Senator is to keep his mouth shut and cheer on the President's plan:<br /><blockquote><br />John Warner -- there's a great puff piece about my senator from Virginia on the front page of the Washington Post saying <span style="font-weight: bold;">what do they want us to do in the Senate, do nothing? That's absolutely right. Absolutely right.<br /><br /></span>Support the troops. Appropriate the funds. Encourage them. Let Dave Petraeus have a chance to win this war. Don't pass a meaningless resolution that, as Joe Lieberman said -- on the one hand, it's non-binding so it's meaningless, but symbolically, it could only encourage our enemies.</blockquote><br />That was preceded by courageous tough-guy Brit Hume's mockery of Chuck Hagel: "I would say there's one exception to that, and that's poor Chuck Hagel, who seems to -- who's getting grandiloquent about voting for a legislatively meaningless Senate resolution and calling it courage. That makes you kind of sad." And earlier in the show, Sen. Lieberman said -- again -- that anti-surge resolutions will "discourage our troops" and "encourage the enemy."<br /><br />So Chuck Hagel needs courage lectures from Brit Hume, John Warner needs permission from Bill Kristol before he can express his views about the war, and we all need to listen to Joe Lieberman and the White House tell us that criticizing the Leader helps the Terrorists. These are the same people -- the President, Lieberman, Bill Kristol, the Fox warriors -- who never tire of dressing up in Winston Churchill costumes and spouting the only historical analogy they know in the most reductionist form possible ("Churchill = strong, war; Chamberlian = weak, anti-war; we must Be Churchill").<br /><br />But Churchill would have recoiled -- he <span style="font-style: italic;">did </span>recoil -- at their argument that criticism of the Leader and the war are improper and hurts the war effort. Churchill repeatedly made the opposite argument -- that one of the strengths of democracies is that leaders are held to account for their decisions and that those decisions are subject to intense and vigorous debate, <span style="font-style: italic;">especially </span>in war. In January, 1942, Britian had suffered a series of defeats and failures (which Churchill candidly acknowledged and for which he took responsibility), and he therefore <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1942/420127a.html">addressed the House of Commons</a> and <span style="font-style: italic;">insisted</span> that a public debate be held in order to determine whether he still had the confidence of the House of Commons in his conduct of the war (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/116972370317192930/#85338">MD</a>):<br /><blockquote><br />From time to time in the life of any Government there come occasions which must be clarified. No one who has read the newspapers of the last few weeks about our affairs at home and abroad can doubt that such an occasion is at hand.<br /><br />Since my return to this country, I have come to the conclusion that I must ask to be sustained by a Vote of Confidence from the House of Commons. This is a thoroughly normal, constitutional, democratic procedure.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> A Debate on the war has been asked for. I have arranged it in the fullest and freest manner for three whole days. </span><br /><br />Any Member will be free to say anything he thinks fit about or against the Administration or against the composition or personalities of the Government, to his heart's content, subject only to the reservation, which the House is always so careful to observe about military secrets. Could you have anything freer than that? Could you have any higher expression of democracy than that? Very few other countries have institutions strong enough to sustain such a thing while they are fighting for their lives. . . .<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">We have had a great deal of bad news lately</span> from the Far East, and I think it highly probable, for reasons which I shall presently explain, that we<span style="font-weight: bold;"> shall have a great deal more.</span> Wrapped up in this bad news will be many tales of blunders and shortcomings, both in foresight and action. No one will pretend for a moment that disasters like these occur without there having been faults and shortcomings.<br /><br />I see all this rolling towards us like the waves in a storm, and that is another reason why I require a formal, solemn Vote of Confidence from the House of Commons, which hitherto in this struggle has never flinched.<span style="font-weight: bold;"> The House would fail in its duty if it did not insist upon two things, first, freedom of debate, and, secondly, a clear, honest, blunt Vote thereafter. </span>Then we shall all know where we are, and all those with whom we have to deal, at home and abroad, friend or foe, will know where we are and where they are. It is because we are to have a free Debate, in which perhaps 20 to 30 Members can take part, that I demand an expression of opinion from the 300 or 400 Members who will have sat silent.<br /><br />I am not asking for any special, personal favours in these circumstances, but I am sure the House would wish to make its position clear; therefore I stand by the ancient, constitutional, Parliamentary doctrine of free debate and faithful voting.<br /></blockquote><br />Churchill then proceeded to give an account of the war and a defense of his strategic decisions (along with numerous admissions of grave error) far more detailed, substantive, lengthy and candid than any given by George Bush on any topic, at any time, during the last six years. He knew that he could and should continue in the war <span style="font-style: italic;">only </span>if he had the support of the Parliament and his country for his decisions, and that support had to be <span style="font-style: italic;">earned</span> through persuasion and disclosure. It was not an entitlement that he could simply demand.<br /><br />Unlike our little Churchillian warriors today, the actual Churchill did not seek to stifle criticism or bully anyone into cheering for him by insisting that they would be helping the Enemy if they criticized him. To the contrary, he ended his 1942 address this way:<br /><blockquote><br />Therefore, I feel entitled to come to the House of Commons, whose servant I am . . . I have never ventured to predict the future. I stand by my original programme, blood, toil, tears and sweat, which is all I have ever offered, to which I added, five months later, "many shortcomings, mistakes and disappointments." But it is because I see the light gleaming behind the clouds and broadening on our path, that I make so bold now as to demand a declaration of confidence of the House of Commons as an additional weapon in the armoury of the united nations.</blockquote><br />And several months earlier, in 1941, Churchill made the point -- in <a href="http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/timeline/411112bwp.html">an address</a> to the House of Commons -- that it would be absurd to turn Parliament into a mindless, rubber-stamping body given that parliamentary democracy was what England was fighting for in the war (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/116972370317192930/#85311">Sysprog</a>):<br /><blockquote><br />The worst that could happen might be that they might have to offer some rather laborious explanations to their constituents. <span style="font-weight: bold;">Let it not be said that parliamentary institutions are being maintained in this country in a farcical or unreal manner. We are fighting for parliamentary institutions. We are endeavouring to keep their full practice and freedom, even in the stress of war.</span><br /></blockquote><br />And, quite similarly, there is <a href="http://www.classic-literature.co.uk/american-authors/19th-century/abraham-lincoln/the-writings-of-abraham-lincoln-02/ebook-page-18.asp">this letter</a> from Abraham Lincoln, written while a member of Congress in 1848, to William Herndon (h/t <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/comments/glenngreenwald/116972370317192930/#85400">FMD</a>). Herndon had argued (echoing the claims from the White House and the likes of Joe Lieberman and Bill Kristol today) that the President had the unrestrained power to wage war against Mexico in order to defend U.S. interests regardless of the views of Congress or anyone else -- a view which Lincoln (<a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/our-supreme-general-has-spoken.html">accurately</a>) found repulsive to the core principles of our political system:<br /><blockquote><br />But to return to your position. Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure.<br /><br />Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,--"I see no probability of the British invading us"; but <b>he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."</b><br /><br />The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.<b> This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.</b></blockquote><br />The view of America as advocated by George Bush and his followers is as antithetical as can be even to the views of the individuals to whom <span style="font-style: italic;">they </span>claim allegiance. They exploit historical events and iconic individuals as tawdry props, and they neither understand them nor actually care about their meaning. They turn them into cheap cartoons -- Churchill! Lincoln! America! -- drained of their actual substance and converted into impoverished, degraded symbols used to promote ideas that are the exact opposite of what they actually embody.<br /><br />Churchill accomplished exactly that which Bush cannot manage -- namely, he convinced his country that the war he was leading was legitimate and necessary and that confidence in his war leadership was warranted. It's precisely because Bush is incapable of achieving that that he and his followers are now insisting that democratic debate itself over the Leader and the war is illegitimate and unpatriotic. One can call that many things. "Churchillian" isn't one of them. Nor, for that matter, is "American."http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/our-little-churchills.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18169267.post-117000724936748857Sun, 28 Jan 2007 17:53:00 +00002007-01-28T19:21:39.546-02:00Just "evolution in action"<span style="font-weight: bold;">(updated below - updated again)</span><br /><br />Glenn Reynolds <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/01/post_2068.php">points</a> to this <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2193012.ece">article</a> from <span style="font-style: italic;">The Independent </span>which reports that a "leading Islamic doctor is urging British Muslims not to vaccinate <span style="font-weight: bold;">their children</span> against diseases such as measles, mumps, and rubella because they contain substances making them unlawful for Muslims to take." Reynolds' <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2007/01/post_2068.php">response</a>:<br /><blockquote><br />JUST THINK OF IT AS EVOLUTION IN ACTION</blockquote><br />I don't think there is any evolutionary theory that celebrates or finds purpose in the death of <span style="font-style: italic;">children</span> as a result of stupid actions taken <span style="font-style: italic;">by their parents</span>. This just seems instead like a good excuse for pointing out how primitive Muslims are and how they deserve death (what else does it mean to say "Just think of it as evolution in action"?).<br /><br />And it would be one thing if the people at risk of death were the adults who refused vaccines for themselves on religious grounds, but what kind of person has this reaction to reading a story about the lives <span style="font-style: italic;">of children</span> being endangered as a result of a denial <span style="font-style: italic;">by their parents </span>of necessary medical precautions? "Evolution in action"? That's just deranged.<br /><br />But beyond that, one does not need to go searching for isolated British Muslim doctors in order to find examples of the lives of children being endangered due to the religious beliefs of adults. Merck, among other pharmaceutical companies, developed a highly effective vaccine against the human papilloma virus (HPV) -- by far the leading cause of cervical cancer in women -- but an entire American political movement called "social conservatism" has been desperately trying to <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/31/MNG2LFGJFT1.DTL">prevent</a> its widespread approval -- or at least persuade parents not to have their daughters vaccinated -- because HPV is a sexually transmitted disease and they therefore believe that a vaccine will be seen as an endorsement of premartal sex:<br /><blockquote><br />A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teen-agers could encourage sexual activity. . . .<br /><br />Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty.<br /><br />Because the vaccine protects against a sexually transmitted virus, many conservatives oppose making it mandatory, citing fears that it could send a subtle message condoning sexual activity before marriage. Several leading groups that promote abstinence are meeting this week to formulate official policies on the vaccine. . . .<br /><br />The vaccine appears to be virtually 100 percent effective against two of the most common cancer-causing HPV strains. </blockquote><br />And those opposing these vaccines are not isolated or fringe groups. Instead, they are the groups that lay at the core of the Republican Party, and have thus received high-level and influential appointments by President Bush, including positions that give them great power over health policy:<br /><blockquote><br />The jockeying reflects the growing influence social conservatives, who had long felt overlooked by Washington, have gained on a broad spectrum of policy issues under the Bush administration. In this case, a former member of the conservative group Focus on the Family serves on the federal panel that is playing a pivotal role in deciding how the vaccine is used.<br /><br />"What the Bush administration has done has taken this coterie of people and put them into very influential positions in Washington," said James Morone Jr., a professor of political science at Brown University. "And it's having an effect in debates like this." </blockquote><br />This is what one of James Dobson's doctors said in explaining opposition to the vaccine:<br /><blockquote><br />"Some people have raised the issue of whether this vaccine may be sending an overall message to teen-agers that, 'We expect you to be sexually active,' " said Reginald Finger, a doctor trained in public health who served as a medical analyst for Focus on the Family before being appointed to the ACIP in 2003.</blockquote><br />And the Family Research Council had <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg18624954.500">this</a> to say:<br /><blockquote><br />In the US, for instance, religious groups are gearing up to oppose vaccination, despite a survey showing 80 per cent of parents favour vaccinating their daughters. "Abstinence is the best way to prevent HPV," says Bridget Maher of the Family Research Council, a leading Christian lobby group that has made much of the fact that, because it can spread by skin contact, condoms are not as effective against HPV as they are against other viruses such as HIV.<br /><br />"Giving the HPV vaccine to young women could be potentially harmful, because they may see it as a licence to engage in premarital sex," Maher claims, though it is arguable how many young women have even heard of the virus.</blockquote><br />Though the FDA finally <a href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/health/273353_cervical09.html">approved</a> the vaccine, social conservative groups <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/09/health/09vaccine.html?ex=1307505600&en=73b5372919d43f3a&amp;ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&amp;emc=rss">continue to lobby</a> for the right of parents to refuse the vaccine for their daughters and to advocate against the HPV vaccine, insisting that abstinence is the preferred course.<br /><br />So, when American Christian girls die of cervical cancer in their teens and early 20s because James Dobson and the rest of the "social conservative" movement convinced their parents that giving them the HPV vaccine would turn them into sex-crazed whores -- and that it's therefore preferable to leave them vulnerable to a cancer-causing viral agent -- should we "just think of that as evolution in action" also?<br /><br />And that's to say nothing of the unwanted pregnancies and cases of HIV transmission due to vigorous religious-based opposition to health programs designed to promote condom usage. When teenagers of Christian parents in the U.S. with no access to condoms have premarital sex and end up with HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, should we "just think of it as evolution in action"?<br /><br />What is really at play here is not hard to discern. If the deaths of children of devout Muslims should be considered nothing more than "evolution in action" -- something that is warranted, even <span style="font-style: italic;">deserved </span>-- then we can start bombing them a lot more indiscriminately without much regret. That's just "evolution in action." Both the intensity and frequency of rhetoric like this directed towards Muslims -- whereby all sorts of <a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_07/009218.php">theories are offered</a> to justify their deaths -- are increasing rapidly.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE</u></b>: As always, the point here is not Reynolds himself (who, like any specific blogger discussed here, is only illustrative). The important point is that Muslim-dehumanizing rhetoric of this type is becoming much more commonplace (that is the point, I believe, of the <a href="http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/01/solidarity.html">recent</a> <a href="http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_01_21.html#006172">mini-controversy</a> over Marty Peretz's <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/meaning-of-marty-peretz.html">blog of bigotry</a>), and what that rhetoric is intended to justify is obvious. In that regard, one should compare Reynolds' commentary on this story to his <a href="http://instapundit.com/archives2/2006/11/post_21.php">notorious post</a> from November, when he cited a reader e-mail and then added his own comments (emphasis added):<br /><blockquote><br />READER: The ball is in the Iraqis' court. We took away the obstacle to their freedom. If they choose to embrace death, corruption, incompetence, lethal religious mania, and stone-age tribalism, then at least we'll finally know<span style="font-weight: bold;"> the limitations of the people in that part of the world.</span> The experiment had to be made.<br /><br />REYNOLDS: . . . it's also true that if democracy can't work in Iraq, then we should probably adopt a<span style="font-weight: bold;"> "more rubble, less trouble"</span> approach to other countries in the region that threaten us. If a comparatively wealthy and secular Arab country can't make it as a democratic republic, then what hope is there for places that are less wealthy, or less secular?</blockquote><br />This is now an an <a href="http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDhmMWFhNTMwZmJhODIxYzFhNWZjMjYxZTY4OTU1Zjk=">emerging theme</a> among war supporters looking for someone to blame for their disastrous war -- "we did everything we could for those people, but alas, they're too primitive and savage to take advantage of it, so it's time to start bombing them ("more rubble") with a clear conscience, knowing they brought it on themselves." If we do that, just think of it as evolution in action.<br /><br />Some commenters have pointed out that, strictly speaking, the actions of a parent that result in the death of a child are part of evolution. Fair enough. But the point is that there are all sorts of comparable acts by American Christians and other religionists (including those above). Reynolds would never link to a story reporting on the death of a 19-year-old Christian girl who died of cervical cancer because James Dobson persuaded her parents to prohibit her from obtaining an HPV vaccine, and then say: "Just think of it as evolution in action." Reynolds' post reveals a way of thinking and speaking about Muslims that is, in equal parts, despicable and dangerous.<br /><br /><b><u>UPDATE II</u></b>: Via <a href="http://www.crookedtimber.org">Henry Farrell</a>, this is about the most cogent explanation I have seen in awhile for what is going on with the anti-Muslim rhetoric arising out of the ash heap we created in Iraq. From Anatol Lieven's <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n22/liev01_.html">review</a> in <i>London Review of Books </i>(sub. req'd):<br /><blockquote><br />One important aspect of Westad’s book is the complex connection he makes between the US and Soviet modernising projects and racism. While both regimes insisted on their right to dictate values and solutions to the benighted peoples of the Third World, both also claimed that those peoples were capable of adopting them, doing so rapidly, and thereby joining the ‘socialist community’ or the ‘free world’.<br /><br />But because, in classic missionary style, both sides saw their truths as self-evident, their programmes as beneficial, and their own benevolence as beyond question, they often had no rational explanation to offer when their projects failed and their clients turned against them. In these cases, there was often an astonishingly rapid swing towards racist explanations. Currently, the neo-cons in America alternate between arguing that all Arab societies are capable of making rapid progress towards democracy (and that anyone who denies this is racist) and asserting that ‘Arabs understand only force.’"</blockquote><br />That about sums up one of the most hopeless contradictions that lies at the heart of our neoconservative, warmongering missions -- the same people who want to convince us that they are doing nothing more than bringing peace, love, joy and freedom to the world with all of their bombings and invasions are also the first to insist that the people in the parts of the world we are invading are brute savages who get what they deserve.<br /><br />That is how Reynolds <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2006/11/06/compare-and-contrast-2/">went</a> from piously accusing war opponents in 2003 of being "racist" for doubting whether we could export democracy to Iraq, to citing in 2006 the so-called "limitations of the people in that part of the world" as proof that the savages in Iraq are incapable of democracy and so it's time instead to start bombing. And when we do, we should just think of it as evolution in action.http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2007/01/just-evolution-in-action.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Glenn Greenwald)0